"Perreault's review is thorough and salutary, usefully setting out the empirical basis for what is often assumed. . . . A call to focus on the macroscale is welcome; analyzing change over long timescales is a contribution exclusive to archaeology."

Susan Greaney | Times Higher Education

“For its critical analysis and corrective approach, this volume is to be commended… The Quality of the Archaeological Record presents a precise and critical commentary on archaeological interpretation that will be of value to students and professionals of archaeology alike.” 

Canadian Journal of Archaeology

“In this cogently argued book Perreault exposes the shaky foundations of many if not most archaeological claims about the past and proposes a new research agenda that plays to the enormous potential of the archaeological record to reveal large-scale patterns in space and time.”

Stephen Shennan, University College London Institute of Archaeology

“Archaeologists have long acknowledged that the archaeological record is not the same as an ethnographic record, yet they apply microscale, ethnographically based explanatory models and theories to the archaeological record. In firm but not shrill language, and by rigorous analyses of the influences of the generally low-scale resolution and dimensionality of the archaeological record, Perreault demonstrates the underdetermined nature (weaknesses) of much modern archaeological research and argues convincingly for ‘recalibrating’ archaeological methods and theories to the macroscale qualities of the archaeological record. This volume is among the top five must-read books to appear since the 1980s.”

R. Lee Lyman, University of Missouri–Columbia

“This book moves the epistemology of the historical sciences in general and archaeology in particular to a new level of sophistication. Perreault’s grasp of ‘nature’s messy experiments’ and his analyses of theories of verification are simply brilliant. His call for ‘macroarchaeology,’ or the search for macroscale phenomena in the archaeological record, optimistically defines our discipline’s future. This book should be mandatory reading for any serious theorist of cultural evolution theory.”

Charles Stanish, University of South Florida

“Perreault’s thesis is both apt and extremely important for archaeologists to address. Thoughtful engagement with it could transform the field, which would make this book the agent of transformation that it deserves to be and that archaeology needs.”

Michael J. Shott, University of Akron