This slim volume presents a detailed account of excavations conducted over a total of thirty-five days between 1981 and 1983 in a rock shelter in Bauchi State of northern Nigeria, together with related studies that serve to set the excavation’s results in their broader context. The excavations were directed by Allsworth-Jones, who has written three of the monograph’s six substantive chapters and co-authored a fourth. The other chapters are contributed, respectively, by M A Sowunmi and E O Awosina and by R M Blench.

While it is welcome and convenient to have this important research conveniently presented in a single volume, earlier accounts of much of it were already in the public domain. The monograph’s bibliography lists no fewer than nine publications on the investigation of Kariya Wuro that appeared in Nigeria between 1982 and 1984. While access to some of these works in other parts of the world is far from easy, it must be recognised that much of the information published in the monograph under review was technically already available. That being the case, it is a little disappointing that the new version has not always been comprehensively updated. Chapter V, on pollen analysis by Sowunmi and Awosina, for example, is virtually unchanged from a paper that appeared in The Nigerian Field in 1991; it contains important observations concerning an early occurrence of Elaeis guineensis (oil palm), but makes no reference to more detailed considerations of the early history of that plant’s exploitation that have subsequently been published by Sowunmi and others.

For readers in Europe or North America, who cannot readily gain access to the Nigeria-published preliminary reports, the monograph will, of course, be extremely useful. The standard of production is high, although some of the maps and tables lack detailed explanation. The description of the excavation itself makes disappointingly slight mention of stratigraphy: the perplexing ‘diagrammatic section’ (fig 22) providing no correlation with the 10cm-levels according to which the artefacts are tabulated. Your reviewer has personal experience of the difficulty of defining stratigraphy in African rock-shelter deposits, and can sympathise with the problems faced by the excavators of Kariya Wuro, but the reader of this monograph might expect a clearer statement of the problems encountered. Two phases of occupation were recognised on the basis of the presence of pottery, described in some detail, in the upper levels. Four radiocarbon dates were obtained, all associated with the later (ceramic) occupation, which appears to have occurred within the last 1,200 years. Stone artefacts were present throughout the deposits, but concentrated in the lower (aceramic) levels; analysis, however, lumps it all together and is limited to very broad categorisation, making no attempt to differentiate that associated with the two phases. It has long been known that the West African Late Stone Age comprised successive aceramic and ceramic phases, but the Kariya Wuro investigation has done little to expand this picture. No dating evidence was recovered for the aceramic phase.

Major difficulties have long been encountered in publishing the results of archaeological research in Africa, and in ensuring that such publications are available both in Africa and elsewhere. Over the past four decades, some African countries – perhaps most notably Nigeria, following a trend initiated by this Society’s gold medallist, the late Professor Thurstan Shaw – have developed journals and other locally based outlets for publications aimed primarily at an expanding local market; however, some of these materials can be virtually impossible to obtain outside their country of origin, whether in other African nations or outside that continent. A corollary is the frequent impossibility of readers in Africa obtaining publications issued in, for example, Europe or North America; even if these materials can be imported, their price at current exchange rates can be prohibitive both for institutions and for individuals that are financed through African economies. The availability of publications online is resulting in some amelioration of these difficulties, but has not yet reached all parts of Africa where it is most needed, nor are all African publications available to readers elsewhere.

It is against this fragmented background that the Kariya Wuro monograph should be viewed. Its published price in Germany is €40 which, at the official exchange rate, represents 0.32 per cent of the maximum annual salary paid to a lecturer at a Nigerian university. This is the equivalent to a UK price of £137. Sales of this book in the African country to which it primarily relates are thus unlikely to be numerous.