This paper examines a central concern in archaeological research: the interplay between technological and social flux over the longue durée. This is done by describing ceramic technological continuity and change, and its correspondence with broader social processes, on the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent past. It presents new ethnographic information from Madang, Papua New Guinea, involving Bilbil and Yabob potters, to outline the chaîne opératoire of pottery production at present. Comparisons with ethnohistorical texts then allow us to model technological change over a longer period of c. 150 years, following the direct historical approach. This shows distinct continuity, but also substantial modification throughout the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries, as the potters negotiated major social upheavals during the colonial and post-independence periods, such as forcible relocation from their offshore islands onto the mainland. This expands our understanding of how social and technological change can take place amongst small-scale, part-time pottery specialists over the longue durée and how this change is reflected in the finished products and raw materials.

Together, the concepts of heterarchy and collective action offer potential explanations for how early state societies may have established high degrees of civic coordination and sophisticated craft industries in the absence of exclusionary political strategies or dominant centralized political hierarchies. The Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 bc) appears to have been heterarchical, which raises critical questions about how its infrastructure facilitated collective action. Digital re-visitation of early excavation reports provides a powerful means of re-examining the nuances of the resulting datasets and the old interpretations offered to explain them. In an early report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilization's largest city, Ernest Mackay described a pair of small non-residential structures at a major street intersection as a ‘hostel’ and ‘office’ for the ‘city fathers’. In this article, Mackay's interpretation that these structures had a public orientation is tested using a geographical information systems approach (GIS) and 3D models derived from plans and descriptions in his report. In addition to supporting aspects of Mackay's interpretation, the resulting analysis indicates that Mohenjo-daro's architecture changed through time, increasingly favouring smaller houses and public structures. Close examination of these small public structures also suggests that they may at times have been part of a single complex.

Painted rock art occurs throughout the islands of the Western Pacific and has previously been argued to have motif and design elements in common, indicating that it was created within the context of a shared symbolic system. Here we report five new painted rock-art sites from Kisar Island in eastern Indonesia and investigate the commonalities between this art and the painted art corpus in Timor-Leste, the independent nation that forms the eastern part of the neighbouring island of Timor. We examine the motifs in the Kisar art and suggest that, rather than being Neolithic in age, some of the figurative motifs more likely have a Metal Age origin, which in this region places them within the last 2500 years.

New developments in the natural sciences are contributing to new thinking on the nature of matter, materiality and being. Such re-visioning of the natural world is, in part, responsible for ‘the ontological turn’, a trend clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. In combination with evolving relational and symmetrical approaches to investigating the constitution of ‘the social’, the door is open for exploring logics, taxonomies and understandings of reality different from our own in studies of the past. Applying these ideas to the investigation of early imperialism, this paper offers an analysis of a key element in the repertoire of Inca material culture that forwards the importance of human–thing relations in the context of early state politics. Working from the basis of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage, the study examines how these objects were deployed in the task of empire-building and what insights they provide into Andean ontological commitments during the late pre-Columbian period. An argument is developed that imperial pots were construed as animate beings and agents of the State. The study brings to the fore the mutually constituted nature of the imperial Inca project and suggests new avenues for future research that highlight the matter of early empires.

The stone of Saint-Samson is a Neolithic stele of 70 tons and 10 m of probable length. Its intriguing leaning position and its very regular morphology have aroused curiosity since medieval times. Three of its four faces—oriented towards the cardinal points—display engravings that were discovered in the 1970s. Now, a new recording protocol has combined 2D techniques for emphasizing the contrast of the engravings (oblique rotating lights) and 3D methods for restoring the volumes of the support (photogrammetry, structured-light scanner). The results obtained have made it possible to implement the first structural analysis of the stone. The north and west faces show an opposition between domestic (cattle, goats) and wild animals (suidae, cervidae, birds, cetaceans), depicted confronted and with their horns or tusks clearly visible. The south face was reserved for the human figure and for iconic artefacts (polished axe, throwing stick, ring disk, steering oar). The four faces have in common the presence of boats. The relationship linking the monument to waterways and the sea is approached by analysing both local legends and the phenomenon of the tidal wave.

A model of five major chronological phases is suggested for the history of human dance. These phases did not replace one another, but accumulated as successive layers. The earliest phase is associated with courtship, thus explaining the potent role of dance in sexual desire and seduction. The second phase is associated with the appearance of modern human behaviour and the earliest burials, which were rites of passage that involved the first communal dances. The third phase is associated with the appearance of hybrid human-animal figurines that point to altered states of consciousness and aspirations to change reality; this is when trance dance, shamanism, magic and religion came in. The fourth phase is connected with the beginning of agriculture in Neolithic villages, which was coordinated by elaborate calendrical ceremonies. The fifth and final phase is associated with urban societies, economic complexity and specialization; well-trained professional dancers now performed acrobatic body movements and elaborate choreography for the enjoyment of others. The history of dance thus reflects the history of human rituals and religion.

A fundamental distinction is made in craft production between custom or bespoke creation and mechanical reproduction that generates multiple iterations of the same form. In Mesoamerica, technologies of reproduction are attested by around the sixth century bc in the form of moulding and stamping, and they become increasingly common in ceramic production in the Maya and neighbouring regions in the third or fourth century. Beginning in the Late Classic period (c. 600–830 ad), Maya artisans applied them to the hieroglyphic script as well, generating a corpus of texts that are at once fundamentally distinct from and intimately linked to the broader scribal tradition dominated by hand-written texts. This article examines Classic Maya texts moulded and stamped on ceramics in the context of scribal practice and the social and cultural role of the script. I argue that these artefacts manifest changes not only in hieroglyphic production, but also in writing's role in user communities. Consequentially, they invite reconsideration of scribal practice's relationship to other crafting traditions, as well as the diversity of modes of engaging in Classic Maya scribal tradition.

This paper seeks to understand how identity was constructed and communities were constituted in the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age of parts of central and southern Britain. A holistic approach is favoured, finding patterns within each period that cross different types of evidence. These patterns can be related to underlying social and conceptual logic systems. It is argued that in the Late Bronze Age communities were relatively fluid and lineage played only a minor role in defining identity. Early Iron Age society was more concerned with ancestral genealogy and inter-generational inheritance. By the Middle Iron Age, this developed to the stage where smaller groups displayed increasing autonomy from each other. These social differences can account for many of the dissimilarities in the archaeological records of the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. Despite contrasting methods of community organization, assessing contiguous periods under the same theoretical and methodological frameworks has proved a useful analytical device.