The Stone of Life continues to be a focus of scholarly attention, receiving reviews such as the following:

It gives a very well-balanced, comprehensive view – to echo Allinsons’ advert, we know it is good because there is ‘nowt taken out’! For the subject, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
Current Archaeology  (March 2014)

It is evident throughout that this book represents a serious meditation on a lifetime of engagement with the study of querns and millstones, and on the cultural and environmental contexts in which they were used. In this sense, it transcends the handbook genre…[Peacock]  has chosen to write a well-rounded, ethnographically and scientifically grounded examination of the topic that is easily accessible to archaeologists who are not specialists in the study of millstones and milling.

Antiquity (April 2015)

For a limited time, it is available at a substantial discount from Oxbow books – click on the front cover to order:

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The Stone of Life is about the archaeology querns and mills, simple stone instruments which are vital to survival in a society which adopts bread as its staple. They become the ‘stones of life’, an essential ingredient in the subsistence strategy of settled agriculturalists.
It might be expected that as querns and mills are commonplace in archaeology, they would be key artefacts, studied exhaustively. Alas, this is far from the case. They have been woefully neglected, although in the last decade there has been burgeoning interest throughout much of Europe and because of this, it is timely to survey the subject, adopting a broad viewpoint. A study on this scale has not been attempted since the late nineteenth century when Bennett and Elton published their magisterial work on the history of corn milling.