REVIEW BY ROB IXER
‘No provenance is better than wrong provenance’ should be tattooed on the forehead of anyone embarking on a career in lithic studies. Forgoing that, buying this book would be a useful long-term alternative.
This quintessential reference/lab book is not one for the field, and in truth not one that can be used easily and well without some training and experience (indeed professional petrologists might feel astonished, even daunted, by some of the exotic sulphide minerals that are included in its mineral tables, or by the plethora of igneous rock names). It is exhaustive – no stone is left unturned.
The first main chapter is a 40-page, highly detailed account of the materials and methods needed for successful mineral identification (and thence to rock ID), ranging from basic crystallography to triboluminescence via, but emphasising, the Mohs scale of hardness, specific gravity, and flame-test results. Much of this, and the subsequent 100 pages of mineral identifications, have been expertly culled from a number of well-known veteran and honoured texts dating from the time before X-ray diffraction (XRD).
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