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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).
Three subsequent chapters, each prefaced by a geological background, give 20 pages of identification tables for igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. The sedimentary rock chapter includes an outline of the major fossil groups (some nomenclature there is dated). The use of fossils to give a sediment its geological age, which can be an enormous help in differentiating provenances between identical-looking sediments, is overlooked.
There are remarkably few typos, factual errors, or oversimplifications, and for a manual that is so factually dense, this is impressive! But is there a market for such a manual, with its almost overwhelming details, or has that time passed? Definitive lithic studies, nowadays, employ a combination of microscopic petrography, XRD, and geochemistry – sometimes requiring all three. In truth, macroscopic lithic identification is now mainly an early triaging event. However, for a serious and experienced lithics person (such as a geologist, archaeologist, or civil engineer), if XRD or pXRF is not an option, this could easily become the go-to manual, and so every lab should have a copy.
Archaeological Stones and their Macroscopical Identification
James A Harrell
Archaeopress, £45
ISBN 978-1803279138
