The reason for the drawing and recording of agricultural tools in the Aşvan bölgesi is partly to study the objects themselves, but mainly to examine the relationship between the tools and the activities for which they were designed and to consider various other features of man/environment interaction which they represent. The significance of agricultural tools in terms of human activities is such that their study forms a necessary component of the baseline situation under study in the Aşvan project (see earlier papers in this volume). This significance holds both for the present situation and also can be extrapolated into the archaeological past.

The agricultural tools, as recorded, range in type from the more generalized to highly specialized. The specialized may be used in only one activity, but these individual activities can only exist as part of an established agricultural system; any archaeological evidence of the corresponding tools forms ideal evidence for the past agricultural systems. For example, ploughs and threshing sleds are for ploughing and threshing only, but both activities need draught animals; threshing relates to cereal agriculture, and so on. Less specialized tool types may reflect less closely inter-connected activities; reaping knives for example, represent reaping of all kinds of crops, weeding, clearing of fallow land and cutting of scrub for fodder or firewood; any interpretation of reaping knives in archaeological context must allow for this diversity of usage.