Ground Stone Analysis

Ground stone analysis is the technological study of stone tools made and used primarily by grinding, pecking, and abrasion rather than by flaking — implements such as manos and metates, querns, mortars and pestles, axes, and polishing stones. Where flaked-stone analysis reads the negative scars of removal, ground stone analysis reads the surfaces themselves, because these tools acquire their form through manufacture techniques like pecking and grinding and acquire wear through the very tasks they performed. Jenny Adams's technological approach reframed ground stone, long treated as a poorly classified residual category, as a coherent class of designed tools whose manufacture, use-wear, and maintenance can be analyzed systematically to recover human behavior. The method characterizes raw-material choice, reconstructs how a tool was shaped and how its working surface was designed, identifies the wear that use produced, and tracks how tools were resharpened and curated over their use-lives. Grounded in experimental replication and use-wear observation, it turns grinding tools into evidence for subsistence, craft, and daily activity.