Archaic · Illinois ground-stone axe
A grooved axe is the clearest introduction to ground stone, because everything that identifies it was made slowly and on purpose. This Archaic example from Illinois was not knapped: it was pecked into shape and then ground smooth, so it carries no flake scars at all, and the transverse groove cut below its rounded poll is the whole diagnosis — that channel is where a split wooden handle sat and was bound. The handle is long gone, which is the point of the lesson. You are reading a tool that is only half present, and learning to tell a hafted axe from a celt, an adze or an unworked cobble by the shape of what is missing. It is the first lesson in the stone tools track.