Palaeostress is the state of stress that acted in a rock in the past, as far as it can be deduced from the structures it left: in practice, the directions of the principal stresses and the stress ratio
The Wallace–Bott hypothesis states that a fault slips parallel to the shear stress resolved on its plane by a uniform stress, each fault independently. A fault-slip inversion is the search for the principal directions and the stress ratio whose predicted slip directions best fit a set of measured faults and striations.