This chert handaxe from France dates to the Mousterian (Middle Palaeolithic) period, ca. 41,000-59,000 BP.

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The handaxe in this model was initially made by a combination of invasive and non-invasive percussion flaking.  The edges were apparently heavily used, with resharpening mostly to the same face on each margin.  The non-invasive resharpening scars tended to end in shallow step or hinge terminations.

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The Acheulean period ended by about 300,000 BP in Europe, replaced by technologies focussed on prepared cores and made by Neanderthals and modern humans like us, but bifacial handaxes remained a persistent element of later European toolkits.  Notable among these are the well-made bifacial handaxes of the ‘Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition’, dating to ca. 50,000 BP and associated with the Neanderthal occupation of Europe.  These handaxes are relatively small, well-made, and are triangular, sub-triangular, or cordate (almond- or heart-shaped).  Bout coupé handaxes—cordiform in shape but with a straight or slightly excurvate butt—are considered the hallmark of Britain’s recolonisation by Neanderthals, ca. 41,000-59,000 BP.

The Acheulean period ended by about 300,000 BP in Europe, replaced by technologies focussed on prepared cores and made by Neanderthals and modern humans like us, but bifacial handaxes remained a persistent element of later European toolkits.  Notable among these are the bifacial handaxes of the ‘Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition’, dating to ca. 50,000 BP and associated with the Neanderthal occupation of Europe.  These handaxes are relatively small, well-made, and are triangular, sub-triangular, or cordate (almond- or heart-shaped).  Bout coupé handaxes—cordiform in shape but with a straight or slightly excurvate butt—are a typical morphology made by Neanderthals.  Use-wear analysis of 19 Mousterian bifaces from Grotte XVI Cave in the Dordogne region of France, dated to ca. 64,600 BP, demonstrates that these were multifunction tools.  They were used to cut and scrape wood, butcher animals, and scrape hides.  They were probably held in the hand—use-wear never occurs on the base—and were resharpened multiple times during use.  Some handaxes were intentionally dulled by crushing or abrading opposite a sharp edge to prevent injury to the hand holding the tool during use.

The archaeologist Denis Peyrony, excavating in the early 20th century, observed that stone artefact assemblages containing bifacial handaxes and Levallois cores were contemporary with each other, thus establishing a continuity of handaxe-making into industries that post-date the Acheulean.  The famous lithic analyst François Bordes later divided the Mousterian into five variants, or ‘facies’:  Ferrassie, Quina, Typical, Denticulate, and Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition.  Handaxes are found most frequently in Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition assemblages.  Bordes saw these Mousterian variants—defined by proportions of artefact types in excavated assemblages—as reflecting cultural groups.  Tools types, according to Bordes, were a reflection of cultural ‘norms’.  The American archaeologist Lewis Binford disagreed with this perspective, arguing instead that artefact types reflected different activities that occurred in these locations, which in turn required different sorts of tools.  According to Binford, tool function conditioned the sorts of artefacts archaeologists find, not cultural norms.  The subsequent Bordes/Binford ‘Mousterian debate’ of the 1960s-70s was  influential in the way archaeologists interpret the past, particularly in the North American scholarly tradition.  In lithic studies, Binford’s ideas paved the way for economic-rationalist interpretations of stone tool production and use, which model how hunter-gatherer integrated least-cost choices into their decisions of how and where to procure food.  Stone artefact assemblages reflect these decisions, and those decisions can be reconstructed in reference to various costs and benefits of tool use.  These economic models underpin many lithic studies today.   Bordes’ legacy lives on in the widespread use of typological systematics—defining ‘industries’ based on proportions of tool types—to reconstruct the culture-history of Europe in particular, and in Africa and Western Asia where European-trained researchers were the first to conduct systematic archaeological research into stone artefacts.  Archaeologists from the Bordes tradition are more likely to invoke cultural explanations of stone artefact patterning than their colleagues who strictly follow a Binford tradition.  Much stone tool research emerging over the last two decades has opted for a middle-ground between these two perspectives, with the nature of lithic assemblages explained as a balance of task-specific decisions within a culturally-determined technology, or ‘technocomplex’.