Identifying leather-working and craft tools

Awls, creasers, punches, and the specialist kits of vanished trades.

Craft tools identify trades on a site: leather-working leaves awls (square-sectioned points — the section distinguishes them from round needles), half-moon knives, creasers and edge tools, and slickers; other trades leave their own kits — burnishers, gravers, punches, draw-plates for wire-making, and crucible fragments for metalworking.

Wear is the witness: an awl polishes along its shaft, a burnisher glosses its working face, punches mushroom at the struck end. Crucibles show glassy slag and metal prills (droplets) that can be identified to the metal melted — evidence of a workshop, not a kitchen.

Record tool section, length, wear zones, and any hafting evidence. A cluster of one trade's tools plus its waste (leather offcuts survive in wet ground; metal prills in any ground) upgrades a findspot from 'lost object' to 'workshop' — worth flagging clearly in the record.

From the guide library inside Collectors Catalogues, a free app for cataloguing antiques and finds with honest, museum-grade records.

More on domestic objects

Identifying mirrors — Polished metal discs.

Identifying oil lamps — Nozzle, filling hole, and mold.

Identifying clay tobacco pipes — Bowl shape and heel marks.

Identifying agricultural tools — Sickles, billhooks, plough irons, and the seasons written in iron.

Identifying fishing gear — Hooks, net weights, and line sinkers from rivers, lakes, and coasts.

Identifying spindle whorls and loom weights — The flywheels and tensioners of home textile production.

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