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xv ACKnOWleDGMenTS My involvement with ground stone tools started long before i had anything to do with the Franchthi project. It was an August afternoon of 1987 in one of the storerooms of the Kozani Archaeological Museum. i was an undergraduate student at Aristotle University at Thessaloniki participating in the Kitrini limni archaeological project. Mihalis Fotiadis, director of the project, passed me a few boxes with ground stone tools from the excavation and survey and asked if I would like to ‘play’with them. I said ‘yes’. it was eight years later, a november afternoon of 1995—I was then a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington—when Tom Jacobsen invited me to undertake the publication of the ground stone tools from Franchthi. Once more i responded positively. My Franchthi journey did not start until May 1997 after i completed my Ph.D. dissertation on an entirely different topic. Being now at the end of the journey, I would like to express my gratitude to both Mihalis and Tom for having started it all. The journey was essentially solitary, as preparations of monographs usually are. Yet, it would not have been possible without the direct or indirect, practical, intellectual, or emotional support from a host of people. i am deeply grateful to Kaddee Vitelli for her continuous, most often gentle, occasionally tough, encouragement through the years. She did an extremely careful reading of an earlier draft of the volume and offered very thoughtful comments. These and the heavy editing that she, ‘being a daughter of an English professor ’, could not resist doing, benefited this volume immensely. Kaddee’s own work on Franchthi, moreover, has provided inspiration and the context for my own work. Catherine Perlès read earlier drafts of both individual chapters and the whole volume. Her comments and suggestions were (of course!) provocative and pushed me to think deeper and better about my material and about Franchthi. i have repeatedly cited her work on the site and on Greek neolithic and i can only hope that i reproduced her ideas accurately. Curtis Runnels also read and commented upon an earlier draft of this volume. I thank him for this and, most importantly, for being a great source of inspiration with his own work on ground stone tools. laure Dubreuil served as the external reviewer . My thanks for her close reading of this study and for offering specific substantial comments that helped make my ideas clearer. With five exceptions, all the drawings were done by Ayla Akin. Ayla did a meticulous job putting the complex use wear of the Franchthi tools on to paper. unfortunately, she will not be here to see her work in print. The exceptions (see Figures 3, 14, 23, 26, and 29) are drawings that were produced before I started my study and were kept in the Franchthi archives. i have not been able to identify the artist who produced these drawings except that her or his initials are A.L.S. My thanks to her or him too. The photographs were taken by me with the help of Mike Strezewski. Anne Chippindale was my editor and she did a great job improving the language and putting it all together. The study of the material took place in the leonardo, the storage facility of the nafplion Archaeological Museum where all ground stone tools and other material found at Franchthi are kept. I spent several months there in 1997 with subsequent visits in later years for further study, drawing, and photography. At the leonardo, museum guards and conservators offered well-needed breaks from intensive and frustrating observations of tools that were or maybe were not a posteror, of surfaces that were used abrasively and also percussively, actively but perhaps also passively, of use wear found on this face and on the other face, and on the sides, and on one of the ends too . . . They wanted to know what life in ‘America’is like, whyAmericans invaded Iraq, and what the hell I think I can learn by looking, and looking again and again, at all these rocks. I am indebted to them all for reminding me that my work as an archaeologist does not take place in a vacuum and that my ground stone tool research makes little sense to people outside a small circle of experts. Extra thanks should go to the museum guards who, always with a great sense of humor (‘will you rebuild Palamidi with these rocks?’), helped lift heavy boxes...

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