John Shea is a Palaeolithic archaeologist, professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University and a skilled flint-knapper. His timely, accessible and succinct book will be welcomed by many. I strongly recommend it, both to undergraduate students embarking on courses in archaeology and palaeoanthropology, and also to their teachers—indeed, especially to the latter. I fear, alas, that it will be wilfully ignored by my grey-haired colleagues in continental Europe who are far too set in their ways to understand the necessity of the radical change of perspective that John Shea expounds. Too bad for them! I am 76; nevertheless, in a journal article about an early Palaeolithic assemblage, I have taken full advantage of Shea's most welcome proposals. Let us see what they are.

He begins by claiming, rightly in my view, that all too often archaeologists have asked inappropriate questions about what can be inferred from stone tool evidence, foremost among which is a self-serving search for an evolutionary narrative in the Palaeolithic record. In Chapter 1, Shea briefly points to significant differences between the ways in which tools are developed and wielded by wild anthropoid apes on the one hand, and are made and used by humans on the other. In Chapter 2 he outlines ‘How we know what we think we know about stone tools’. These two chapters state baldly the minimum that a new undergraduate student needs to know. This no-frills approach is refreshing in so far as it dismisses recondite expositions replete with false erudition and bowed under with jargon that initiates are expected to rehearse.

In Chapter 3, Shea criticises traditional archaeological discourses about Palaeolithic artefacts in terms of age-stages, industries and techno-complexes, and offers a novel descriptive framework of stone artefacts in terms of ‘Modes A–I’. This approach has enthused me ever since it was first proposed by Shea (Reference Shea2013). Modes A–I are based on a differential diagnostic approach that is grounded in simple mutual exclusivity with regard to physical attributes, nothing more or less. Shea's modes have nothing whatsoever to do with Grahame Clark's well-known modes 1–5 or 1–6 that boil down to no more than quasi-evolutionary homotaxial conjectures for interpreting Palaeolithic archaeology. Shea's descriptive modes dispense with recourse to what elsewhere he has called ‘NASTIES’, or ‘Named Stone Tool Industries’, such as Aurignacian, Lupemban, Folsom, Mousterian, Gravettian, Oldowan, Acheulean and Emiran.

Shea proceeds in Chapters 4 and 5 to consider stone cutting tools and logistical mobility, followed in Chapters 6, 7 and 8 by reflections on language and symbolic artefacts, dispersal and diaspora, and sedentism. While these chapters are undoubtedly appropriate for introducing undergraduate students to the subject of stone artefacts around the world and across a vast period of time, their synthetic approach, sometimes discursive, sometimes breathless, nevertheless sits rather awkwardly with both the methodological rigour enjoined in Chapter 3 and the succinctness of Chapters 1 and 2. For instance, Box 4 on ‘Behavioural modernity and behavioural variability’, in Chapter 6, might well have deserved a short chapter in its own right.

One can understand that the publisher seeks wide sales of a short primer such as this among students in North America, Africa and the Antipodes, and is therefore content with the coverage of these continents; less affluent undergraduates who easily can read English in Asian countries are, however, less well served by the coverage. Herein lies a worrying problem, namely, that the mighty dollar rules, and increasingly, academic presses focus their attention on the most profitable markets—and their prehistoric territories.

Without doubt John Shea's book is a worthwhile contribution, although I cannot help feeling that really it has compressed two somewhat different books into one. I recommend it both to students and, especially, to their university and college teachers. It is to be hoped that translations into French, German, Italian and Spanish can be published, because students and professors in those languages need this book even more than English-language readers.