Like beauty, ‘types’ lie in the eye of the beholder. As beholders, we archaeologists wrangle over whether prehistoric folk were aware of those ‘types’, labelled by us as separate types of artefacts produced by them, and, if so, whether they were inspired to fashion them in particular separate ways. The problem is especially acute in palaeolithic archaeology. Here are a few obvious reasons why. Stone-tool ‘types’ play a prominent role as index fossils in cultural and time-ordered succession in deposits which can be devoid of other traces of human impingement and can have undergone sedimentary change and attrition even during the self-same thousands of years during which they were accumulating, as well as afterwards. Moreover, since their first appearance two-and-a-half million years ago, stone tools have been made by several species of hominins whose evolving cognitive abilities and manual skills cannot be readily compared with those of today’s indigenous stone-knappers: these live in hunter-gatherer social groups with, moreover, a higher proportion of skilful adults to fumbling unskilled youngsters than surely was the case even as recently as 20,000 years ago. Furthermore, unlike clay or metal, stone cannot be moulded into shapes; instead, different kinds of rocks and stones, varying in shape or size, are an intractable raw material, which may contain irregular physico-chemical properties that affect knapping in an unforeseeable manner. They may be partly or largely worked and used away from sites excavated by archaeologists, whose record of the proportions of artefact ‘types’, not to mention the knapping debris, renders actualistic interpretation hazardous when not downright foolhardy. It should be borne in mind that appropriate raw material may be sparse on the ground, such that, on the one hand, a stone tool may have had to be used in several different ways as well as modified for reuse, and, on the other, there may have been a need often to make recourse to whatever stones were nearest to hand, even if the products were rudimentary where stones lent themselves only with difficulty to knapping.

This brings us back to the nub of the matter. In considering lithic assemblages, how accurately can we recognize different artefact ‘types’ and use them to separate one group of more or less similar pieces from another, in order to help us make useful comparisons and contrasts between those groupings we have decided upon? Do our groups ‘really’ correspond to separate forms or ‘types’ of tools and, in some way, reflect real differences perceived and conceived in accordance with a figurative template in the primitive mind? Do they reflect different procedures to produce different forms – or, more awkward for us, to produce ostensibly the same form (see below) and perhaps to rework or modify it to keep it fit for purpose? And, if so, what might this imply both about our capacity for recognition as analytical observers and about the evolution of cognition in prehistoric times? Here meticulous retouch analysis has an important role to play.

One example in this book is a chapter by Patrick Quinn, William Andrefsky Jr, Ian Kujt and Bill Finlayson about Near Eastern pre-pottery neolithic A el-Khiam points which were shaped for hafting but are shown to have characteristics that would have made them efficient as awls, drills or perforating tools. Cheryl Harper and Andrefsky use retouch analysis of New Mexico hafted bifacial points to show that many that had been made for use as darts during the Archaic period were later reused as cutting tools in Ancestral Pueblo times (when darts had been replaced by arrows with smaller, more expedient bifacial tips). Andrefsky also shows in another chapter how retouch analysis can throw light on the extent to which projectile points were resharpened and underwent changes in shape and size the further away some hunter-gatherers ranged from base sites in the north-western USA.

I am a keenly interested bystander but not a specialist in lithic typological analysis, which in recent years has undergone significant advances in methodological approaches, as the fourteen essays in this book amply demonstrate. My interest in the matter stems from being both an archaeologist who is excavating an intriguing early European palaeolithic assemblage and a natural scientist interested in cognitive evolution in the genus Homo (Walker et al Reference Walker2006; Walker Reference Walker2009). As implied by my earlier remarks, a fundamental concern is how we can identify irregular regularities and regular irregularities in stone-tool production, and determine why it is that stone artefacts which look ostensibly alike can be different in significant ways, whilst others which seem rather different may have much more in common than appears to be the case at first glance. Sceptical critical realism means that scientific knowledge is frequently counter-intuitive. Often this lays a heavy burden on the mental resources of those reared in that tradition of simple-minded disingenuous realism that still pervades the humanities and social studies, even in the twenty-first century.

Happily, there are important essays in this book which buck that trend. One of them is a case study of the Perigordian assemblage from La Colombière written by two outstanding young researchers who were yet to be awarded their doctorates, Metin Eren and Mary Prendergast. It explains precisely how some different statistical indices (for example, unifacial reduction index, invasiveness index) of how far reduction by knapping has affected a stone artefact are related to one another, despite sometimes seeming to imply conflicting interpretations; and how the latter may be resolved by estimating the percentage of reduction of a stone blank that has taken place, and then plotting it on a three-dimensional graph against the other indices, in order to achieve a more objective representation of the way in which the artefact had been transformed. Put in everyday language, far from throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the transformation affects both – even though an unfamiliar result may well bear scant resemblance to either! This is a timely wake-up call to archaeologists. The good news is that even after the death of ‘types’, something can rise up from the ashes, albeit with ectoplasmic intangibility.

This is far from being some arcane wrangle. There is a well-known debate about whether some long-accepted palaeolithic ‘types’ of stone artefacts might be no more than artefacts of misplaced scientific methodology – in other words, whether they might represent no more than different stages in a lithic reduction sequence: some ostensibly different Mousterian scrapers have been interpreted in this way. Peter Hiscock and Chris Clarkson here deploy indices of reduction of blanks and invasiveness of retouch in an analysis of the Mousterian from level 21 at Combe Grenal, which lends support to considerations by some other specialists that sometimes there may indeed be inherently different patterns, and they suggest that different reduction schemes may coexist even within one and the same assemblage. Nor do they rule out a strong possibility that different procedures might give rise to what ostensibly seems to be but a single form. They conclude: ‘demonstrating that retouching processes need not involve typological conversions does not indicate that typological stability during reduction entailed a specific design. In the instance of Combe Grenal the strong connection of retouch location, form, and extent with blank form may provide a mechanism for regular and stable implement shapes over the reduction process, even if no well-defined, formal design was in place.’ As they mention, similar inferences have been drawn by Eric Boëda and Alain Turq, to whom must surely be added Philip van Peer (van Peer Reference van Peer1992). However, the importance of their chapter lies in the metrical analysis of retouch data that reinforces the conclusion.

The fourteen essays in this book range widely in space and time through Australia and North America to Neolithic Jordan, and all of them provide stimulating food for thought. Although some case studies consider aspects of provisioning and curation of stone tools, I wonder whether in order to do them justice a separate volume on these matters might not have been more appropriate, or at any rate a longer section devoted to them, because there is a need to spell out in further detail just what their methodological feedback is into analyses of long-vanished palaeolithic assemblages. It is unfortunate that refitting analyses find no place in this volume, as they might well complement the other approaches admirably. I detect a lack of balance in the book. Perhaps more European researchers should have been invited to participate. Readers should take note that two of the fourteen chapters were written by the editor, who is also co-author of another three.

The text is fleshed out with a large number of clear and helpful illustrations and tables. Each chapter has its own bibliographical references, which helps readers far more than would a twenty-page bibliography at the end of a book. The general index, alas, is wholly inadequate and does not even reach four full pages of text. There are egregious printing errors, which a competent proofreader would have removed. On page 73, ‘visa versa’ slipped through. The possessive case of Bordes is variously printed as ‘Borde’s’ (p 116) and ‘Bordes’s’ (pp 106, 131). The Musée National de Préhistoire appears three times as Musèe National de Prèhistoire (pp 106, 117).