This is a significant update of the well-received and highly praised first edition Quaternary Paleoclimatology, which appeared in 1985. The revision has been long awaited. Much has changed in our understanding of Quaternary climates and climate change in the past 15 years. As the author notes in the Preface to the new edition, when the original edition was in the works "AMS radiocarbon dating was hardly being used, we knew nothing of Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles and their relationship to North Atlantic thermohaline circulation, [and] the significance of Heinrich events had not been fully recognized" (p. xiii). This volume has the same basic structure and comprehensive coverage that made the first edition so successful, but also contains both reorganized and new chapters to reflect and cover the astonishing array of discoveries in Quaternary geosciences in the past decade and a half.
The book is composed of 12 chapters plus two appendices. The chapters include both method and theory, but as the title implies, the focus is on methods of reconstructing the past. Chapter 1 on "Paleoclimatic Reconstruction" is a broad introduction to the topic, dealing with sources of paleoclimatic information, levels of paleoclimatic analysis, and modeling. Chapter 2 on "Climate and Climatic Variation" provides a good treatment of general issues in climatology (e.g., the nature of climate and climatic variation, and feedback mechanisms) as well as an overview of various timescales of climatic variation. The chapter closes with a very good, up-to-date discussion of variations in the Earth's orbital parameters and their significance to climate and climate change.
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with "Dating Methods." In both the first edition of the book and in this one, Bradley provides the best single-author treatment of Quaternary dating methods (which also means archaeological methods) available. Chapter 2 deals with radioisotopic methods (radiocarbon, potassiumargon, uranium-series, fission-track, and the various luminescence approaches). The discussions are succinct, but thorough, and very timely. Chapter 4 covers other methods of significance in Quaternary and archaeological research such as paleomagnetism, various chemical changes (amino acid and obsidian hydration dating and tephrochronology), and biological methods (lichenometry and dendrochronology).
The next two chapters cover ice cores (Chapter 5) and marine sediments and corals (Chapter 6). The data from the deep ocean revolutionized Quaternary studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the study of ice cores brought further "paradigm shifts" in our understanding of the Quaternary (and especially glacial-interglacial cycles) in the past decade. The author does an excellent job of sorting through a vast array of data to present the theory as well as the data and interpretations.
Most of the rest of the chapters deal with specific sources of data for paleoclimatic reconstructions. Chapter 7 covers various nonmarine geologic evidence such as loess, snowlines, mountain glacier fluctuations, lake-level changes, and speleothems. Chapter 8 deals with two key sources of nonmarine biological evidence, plant macrofossils and insects, while Chapter 9 is devoted entirely to pollen analysis. Dendroclimatology is discussed in Chapter 10, and documentary sources of data are covered in Chapter 11. The final chapter ( ) is a very informative and comprehensive discussion of paleoclimate models.
The two appendices are very useful. Appendix A is a further consideration of radiocarbon dating, dealing with the calculation of radiocarbon ages and standardization, and fractionation effects. Appendix B is a useful (though certainly soon to be dated) listing of resources on paleoclimatology on the worldwide web.
This is an outstanding volume and a must for the library of any researchers dealing with the Quaternary. This certainly includes archaeologists and geoarchaeologists. In this reviewer's experience, archaeologists often view themselves as a separate breed from Quaternary scientists or are perceived as