This book presents an investigation of two of the National Museum of Scotland's older lithic collections, the assemblages from Airhouse and Overhowden in the Scottish Borders. The Airhouse assemblage numbers 558 lithic artefacts and the Overhowden assemblage 109 lithic artefacts. They were both collected in the first part of the 20th Century from locations situated a few hundred metres from the Overhowden Henge (with which they may in some way be associated), and they both embrace a broad spectrum of Late Neolithic tools, with relatively sophisticated, or 'fancy', pieces being notably more prominent than in other collections from this period. As a whole, this new corpus of comparative material offers a unique opportunity to gain insight into the seemingly unusual material from Airhouse/Overhowden by placing it in a wider Late Neolithic context.

Today the number of pitchstone-bearing sites in northern Britain has multiplied several times and approximately 20,300 worked pieces from c. 350 sites have been found; pitchstone artefacts have been reported from practically all parts of Scotland (apart from Shetland), as well as from northern England, Northern Ireland, and the Isle of Man. This report collates this information and reinterprets the distribution of pitchstone finds and the social context of pitchstone use.

A system for the hierarchical Classification of Lithic Artefacts from the British Late Glacial and Holocene Periods is offered in this book. It is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts. To allow the individual categories of lithic objects to be classified and characterised in detail, it was necessary to first define a number of descriptive terms, which forms the first part of this guide. The main part of the book is the lithic classification section, which offers definitions of the individual formal debitage, core and tool types. The basic questions asked are: what defines Object X as a tool and not a piece of debitage or a core; what defines a microlith as a microlith and not a knife or a piercer; and what defines a specific implement as a scalene triangle and not an isosceles one? As shown in the book, there are disagreements within the lithics community as to the specific definition of some types, demonstrating the need for all lithics reports to define which typological framework they are based on. The eBook edition of this publication is available in Open Access, supported by Historic Environment Scotland.