The location and the orientation of usewear on stone tools usually reflects the kinetic motion involved, such as cutting or scraping. Normally bifacial or edge damage is observed on cutting tools having usewear. Scraping tools usually demonstrate unifacial wear in addition to bifacial and edge locations. The usewear on the majority of the utilized artifacts recovered from Site 72-31 is located on only the edges of tools. The smaller percentage of unifacial usewear suggests some tasks performed may have involved uni-directional scraping.
Surface wear results from handling or hafting a tool, surface wear occurred on only one artifact.
However, it should be mentioned that surface wear is not readily visible on the numerous quartz artifacts, which may account for the low frequency of surface wear at this site. The plan of usewear which is most frequent among the utilized lithic artifacts at Site 72-31 is along a convex edge. Utilized artifacts with usewear along a straight edge appear to make up a significant amount of the utilized artifacts. A very small proportion of the artifacts demonstrated usewear along a concave edge. Some of the artifacts which have a mixed plan of wear may be multipurpose tools.