On a global scale an argument can be made and easily defended that chipped stone tools and debitage represent the most abundant form of artifacts found on prehistoric sites. In many areas of the world they represent the only form of remains that have withstood the inroads of environmental and human perturbation, such as erosion, decay, and landscape development. Because of this, lithic artifacts represent one of the most important clues to understanding prehistoric lifeways. Yet many archaeologists and most laymen do not understand how stone tools can be analyzed to obtain information about prehistoric lifeways and behavior. Recently I was asked by a graduate student in anthropology what I had found at a site on which I had been working for the past several years. I briefly described a whole array of flake tools, production debitage, bifaces, and raw-material variability. The student was apparently from the school of thought that associates archaeology with the science of discovering buried cities and hidden treasures, because she responded, “how about the good stuff – did you find any good artifacts?” Believing these to be the good artifacts I described how various artifacts and their characteristics relate to time depth, prehistoric exchange, relative sedentism, function, and prehistoric economy. This exchange led me to think about the things lithics can bring to the broader field of archaeology and how the epistemology of lithic artifacts has changed over the past century since lithic studies were first given serious consideration in the archaeological literature.