Debitage or chipping waste is the most commonly encountered artifact in preceramic cultures worldwide. Debitage refers to all waste material created during the course of stone artifact manufacture, including flakes, cores, broken and aborted preforms.
Archaeologists are well acquainted with the attributes that distinguish human-made flakes from those created by natural processes or ‘geofacts’. Geofacts are flakes or spalls created by natural forces such as landslides, stream action, exfoliation, and frost fracturing. Human-made flakes retain attributes that are directly attributable to the forces that produced them, such as prominent striking platforms (sometimes prepared), bulbs of force (Hertzian cone remnants), or lipped striking platforms, and flake scars from flakes previously removed from a core. Cores, masses from which flakes were removed, exhibit negative flake scars, negative bulbs of force, often prepared striking platforms, sometimes multiple striking platforms and flake scars showing flakes removed from different directions.
Artifacts broken in manufacture such as bifaces, discarded tools used in chipped stone tool manufacture such as hammer stones, billets, punches, pressure implements, that are discarded at the chipping location of workshop are also considered as debitage or wastage.
Archaeologists can learn much information from debitage analysis. For example, when biface tools such as projectile points are the object of production, debitage from the manufacture of a single point reveals the technological methods, strategy, and trajectory of the process. Furthermore, recovery of the microdebitage (flakes smaller than 10 mm), will likely identify the location where person worked.
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