Introduction

The last two decades have seen a shift in use-wear research, greatly due to the progress of modern technology and development of sophisticated techniques.
Since the previous works centred upon the nature of polish formation, many studies dealing with varied questions, such as the effects of materials and techniques on the formation of use-wear, the search for analytical procedures, experiments in order to establish use-wear patterns, have contributed to the systematisation of the use-wear analysis.
The majority of use-wear studies have centred upon flint stone tools and the method is well established.

However the situation is quite different concerning stone tools made on non flint raw materials. Tools made on quartz, quartzite, rock crystal, obsidian for example, have been neglected, too often excluded from use-wear studies due to the physical properties of these raw materials, rendering the observation under microscope highly difficult, and leading to a lack of studies for these kinds of rocks.

In the past few years there has been considerable innovation in use-wear methods for non flint raw materials, with the development of several original analytical techniques for distinguishing and identifying between different wear patterns.
There has been a crescent interest for non flint stone tools in a general manner, being studied along with flint. The progress of modern technology increased the development of sophisticated methods of use-wear analysis, highlighting the inherent complexity of the role of raw material physical properties during use.
Given the fact that the high variety of use-wear result from encounters between structure, composition, morphology and use in a particular social and economic context, use-wear studies of non flint raw materials recently developed focused on understanding how the physical properties of the raw materials determine the formation of use wear by using highly sophisticated equipment like the Scanning Electron Microscopy, the Confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy and the nanoidentation technique.

International researchers working on non flint stone tools use-wear analysis were invited to present their work in two main scopes:

• Exploring the methodological improvements made in use-wear studies of non flint stone tools in the past few years;
• Arising questions and debate on the issue of the non flint raw materials procurement and its use in archaeological contexts from different periods and varied origins in terms of economic and social strategies by past societies was the other goal of the workshop.

Finally, we added to the workshop proceedings papers from two authors which results are from great interest to the debated issues.