The Map Collector

Rock, apparently, is not a synonym for stone. Now, I know a lot of words, and the definitions to most of them, but I went a little over three decades before I encountered this geological distinction in an anecdote that Barry Lopez shares in his book Horizon—a distinction that he, too, missed for years. A rock is still what you would expect. The hard stuff made of minerals. A stone, however, is a rock that has been modified in some way for human use. Crushed for gravel, shaped for a cornerstone, knapped into an arrowhead. I guess that means that rocks belong to geologists, and stones to archaeologists*.
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