The subtitle of this book best captures its theme: an examination of retouch indices to characterize the extent of tool maintenance that is influenced by a variety of factors such as raw material quality and abundance, mobility patterns, tool function and form, and to a lesser extent the initial production of tools. The papers in this edited volume focus on the evaluation of such indices, how the indices may reveal broader patterns of exploitation and settlement, and notions of designed tool form in opposition to form change resulting from maintenance per se. All of the papers address the issue of retouch indices, how they are constructed, and how they can be applied in particular situations. There is clearly disagreement among the authors, as noted in the second chapter by Shott and Nelson, which amounts to an internal commentary on the volume. Although this book will primarily appeal to a more specialist audience within the archaeological community, the different approaches to lithic analysis proposed by the authors will be of great value in broader archaeological interpretation as issues raised in the volume are explored in the future.
The editor, Andrefsky, briefly introduces the volume, and this is followed by Shott and Nelson's useful commentary. The next two papers, one by Eren and Prendergast and the other by Wilson and Andrefsky, use experimental data to evaluate retouch indices. The fifth paper, by Hiscock and Clarkson, employs Mousterian material from Combe Grenal in France to reexamine the extent to which maintenance retouch is responsible for form in scrapers. The paper by Blades then draws attention to the need to separate retouch associated with reduction to manufacture tools (reduction intensity) from that associated with function and use (retouch intensity). The seventh paper (Quinn, Andrefsky, Kuijt, and Finlayson) provides a good example of the problems associated with applying generalized retouch indices to a specialized tool, and offers a more specifically designed assessment of use for el-Khiam points from the Levant. This and the subsequent paper by Harper and Andrefsky, on hafted bifaces from New Mexico, also provide good illustrations of the morphological and functional changes that particular tools undergo during the course of their use lives. The Harper and Andrefsky paper also provides an interesting example of tool recycling.
The next three papers focus on how lithic raw material quality and accessibility impact tool maintenance and use. Andrefsky revisits this theme of variation in hafted biface function (projectile point, cutting tool) as it relates to retouch patterns, in turn using that as a base from which to understand variation in retouching and maintenance decisions related to obsidian source proximity. He provides a case study, from the Birch Creek site in Oregon, where only locally sourced points from an archaeological site were damaged, suggesting that those made of nonlocal materials were discarded and replaced near distant quarries because it was too far to travel back to the residential camp to do this. MacDonald's paper on Skink Rockshelter in West Virginia is a very interesting study showing more maintenance of nonlocal lithic source tools (Upper Mercer chert), and hence that these tools are also smaller, but that the abundance of moderate quality local Kanawha chert resulted in its overall dominance in the assemblage. In the third of these raw material papers, Bradbury, Carr, and Cooper employ an experimental approach and found that material quality (low, medium, and high) was reflected in flake form. They also found that the best predictor of original flake mass for flake tools was maximum flake thickness. The last paper in the volume (Chapter 14), by Goodale, Kuijt, MacFarlan, Osterhoudt, and Finlayson, models how core reduction is influenced by raw material quality and availability. They then use this information to evaluate how the relationship between producers and consumers of tools also influences variability in core reduction