asce litiche = stone axes

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Note added at 4 mins (2007-06-27 09:35:16 GMT)
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http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/ancienttech/stone.htm...
Flint and obsidian were the primary material for making stone axes when chipping and flaking technologies were used but some cultures found that they could make use of rocks such as basalt by grinding them into axes which were attached to a shaft. Before this, the earliest axes were hand-axes fashioned into a cutting tool by removing a few flakes on two sides of a hand-sized pebble.

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Note added at 30 mins (2007-06-27 10:00:45 GMT)
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http://www.megalithic.co.uk/comments.php?op=Reply&pid=0&sid=...
Living in an age of stone: Neolithic peoples and their worlds
by Andy B on Tuesday, 20 March 2007
Professor Gabriel Cooney, UCD School of Archaeology, University College Dublin. The Rhind Lectures 2007 at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
Friday 27th April, Saturday 28th April, Sunday 29th April
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL, no ticket required
[...]
Stone axes are taken as being emblematic of the Neolithic in Ireland and Britain. However in Ireland ground stone axes were in use from the early Mesolithic one. What marks off the use and role of stone axes in the Neolithic is a dramatic shift in the materials utilised to make them and the places and processes by which they were created. It will be argued that these changes are critical to a sense of what defines the Neolithic.