Focusing here on the differences in artifact use in regions where raw materials are abundant, versus those places where they are rare, permits several generalizations with regards to raw material consumption. As a material class, flaked stone is durable and often the material is sourcable to geological origin point and due to these features, lithics analysis share some attributes with consumption studies of other artifact classes. One characteristic that differentiates lithics is that they are among the more resilient archaeological materials, and are sometimes used as a proxy for mobility or exchange. However, the lithics material class is comparable with other artifacts of consumption like ceramics, food goods and textiles, in that lithics are used to produce goods that range from mundane or subsistence-level to elaborate forms that imply the goods were inscribed with social or ritual importance.

Lithics have important differences from other artifact classes, however. Principally, the production of stone tools is a reductive technology and flaked stone tools inevitably become smaller with use. This directionality of lithic reduction, which allows for technical analysis and refitting studies, signifies that, unlike metal projectiles, textiles, and other widely exchanged materials, the down-the-line transfer and use of lithics has distinctly circumscribed use-life based on reduction. The second major implication of the reductive nature of stone is in regards to the social distance between the producer and consumer. As stone artifacts become inexorably smaller with production and use, larger starting nodules can take more potential forms and have a generalized utility that is progressively lost as reduction proceeds. In terms of the exchange value of a projectile point as a "cultural good", the roughing out of a lanceolate point, for example, may have determined the cultural value of the preform such that it would have had less potential, and therefore less value, in contexts where triangular points are used. With scarce lithic raw materials the size of the item probably related directly with its reduction potential; therefore larger nodules would probably have had value in a wider range of consumption contexts.

Lithic procurement, distribution, and consumption are in some ways comparable with other classes of portable artifacts, and in some ways quite distinct. Archaeologists have used the spatial relationships between lithic raw material and behavior to study the ways in which the availability of a particular material type affects prehistoric behavior with respect to production, curation and mobility (Bamforth 1986;Luedtke 1984;Shott 1996). Procurement, distance from source, and the embedding of lithic provisioning in subsistence rounds have specific consequences with respect to raw material use in the vicinity of a geological source area (Binford 1979;Gould and Saggers 1985), an issue to be discussed in more detail below. Regardless of mode of transfer and other distributional issues, the use of lithic raw materials, as with other artifact classes, is contingent on variability in a number of dimensions. These dimensions include whether the material is abundant or rare, lightly or intensely procured, laden with cultural or prestigious associations, as well as circulation and demand, although many of these variables can be difficult to isolate archaeologically.