This was the last major publication of Professor Peacock and certainly it is not a dying whimper but is broad and almost lusty (as in the old joke, holding the staff of life), informative and eclectic (and essentially self-published). He correctly acknowledges Chris Green for his illustrations and these certainly do aid the text, especially the mill varieties and their possible degrees of freedom.
As the title suggests, the opening five chapters (after an Introduction) describe saddle querns, concentrating on the Neolithic and the interrelationship between ‘Neolithic querns and the spread of agriculture’; the mainly Mediterranean Olynthus mill; the revolution that was the rotary quern; Pompeian-style mills; and finally (water) power mills. A progression from (wo)man to beast to natural force-driven, from the portable to the highly static and from the ‘simple’ to complex and organised, but always a petrified reflection of (and response to) improving agriculture, especially cereal production.
The short Chapter 7 concentrates on grain and its milling and consumption. It includes recipes for spicy frumenty and its poorer relation, pottage, but mainly records milling rates (flour production) with the various querns and mills, giving both ethnographical and experimental data. Although there is broad agreement, and the results seem common-sensible, Peacock shows that more needs to be done, including his excellent suggestion that millstone wear-rates should be measured in order to help determine the working lifetime of a stone.
In Chapter 8, ‘From quarry to user’, all the expected rocks are there – the lavas from the Eifel district (Mayern/Niedermendig) and their ‘counterparts’ in the Puy de Dôme area and then the English ones, first the Hertfordshire Puddingstone (and its less familiar Norman antecedents), the eponymous sandstone from the Millstone Grit at Wharncliffe, Lower Greensand sandstones including those from Lodsworth Quarry – a site found by gritted determination and luck by Peacock – and the Kentish querns from the sandstone cliffs at Folkestone and more. This chapter brings to mind Professor J R L Allen’s definitive Whetstones from Roman Silchester (Allen Reference Allen2014).
Chapter 9, ‘A matter of life and death’, deals with the symbolism of querns and mills, drawing on the role of rotating mills and weighted millstones as metaphors in European folk tales, but missing one of the most germane, namely Jack and the Beanstalk/the Giant Killer and the very explicit Fe fi fo fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he living, be he dead. I’ll grind his bones to make my bread. Less obviously, although poor, intoxicating Sir John Barleycorn, who is cut ‘skin from bone’ or, in other versions of the song, ‘flayed skin from bone’, is given justified prominence, but (despite Peacock’s interest in Mesoamerican querns and flour production) there is no mention of the Mexican god Xipe Totec (‘Our Lord the Flayed One’), the god of germinating maize and hence of the rotating cycle of death/birth/rebirth; perhaps one analogy, or an elusive mystery, too far from Europe.
The final, Whiggish chapter, ‘Methods into the future’, is a mixture. It discusses the role of petrography and geochemistry in ‘rock characterisation’; this is fairly familiar ground, but it also introduces the more novel use of organic residues (phytoliths) trapped in voids within querns/mills (akin in scope and promise to the research into organic residues smeared onto the insides of cooking pottery sherds) as a means of discussing cereal use. As with the rest of the book, it leaves a strong invitation for someone to continue the ‘journey’.
Professor Peacock was perhaps the foremost British archaeolithologist of his time and many of his students have continued to travel his path. His petrographical (he would insist in earlier days – but not here – on using the incorrect term ‘petrological’, a minor disservice to archaeogeology that can be forgiven, but is best forgotten) work augmented by geochemistry was always to a purpose, mainly provenancing raw materials or assessing their suitability, but also the starting point for wider, more abstract and social concerns, as demonstrated throughout this volume.
Peacock was of the last, or possibly last-but-one, generation taught petrography in a serious and rigorous fashion, so learning to respect and know its value (and limitations) in both lithic and ceramic studies, but he also lived in tandem with the infancy and adolescence of archaeological geochemistry. Indeed, he was godfather to some of it. In 2015 his death, compounded by that of Professor Vin Davis (singlehandedly responsible for the renaissance of the Implement Petrology [sic] Group in the last decade) and of John Watson (who performed much of the detailed geochemistry of the Stonehenge orthostats in the 1990s and twenty-five years later worked on the chemical and geophysical characterisation of Stonehenge debitage and Bronze Age bracers), has reduced our ability to discuss the ‘biographies’ of stone objects from their outset and from a rock-fast setting. These were researchers who knew that ‘a wrong provenance is worse than no provenance’ and that, although some lithologies can be correctly described macroscopically, accurate provenancing requires good thin-section petrography supplemented by accurate geochemistry, plus experience. Already these truths are being neglected, perhaps even negated, and it may be that in fifty years the portable XRF machine, or rather its indiscriminate and uncritical use, will be seen as one of the banes of early twenty-first-century archaeology.
But it is to be hoped not, for this book encapsulates what could, should and can be done with an academic life filled with lithics, imagination and flair.
