Communal ceremonial sites and social groups often share mutually reinforcing and structuring properties. As a result of this dynamic relationship, ceremonial sites and social groups exhibit ever-emergent properties as long-term works-in-progress. Ceremonial kod sites featuring shrines of trumpet shells and dugong bones were central to the communal ritual life of Torres Strait Islanders. Continuously formed over the generations by ritual additions, these shrines were linked to ongoing maintenance, legitimization and cohesion of totemic clans and moieties that formed the structural basis of island communities. As such, understanding the history of kod sites provides an opportunity to investigate the historical emergence of ethnographically-known social groups in Torres Strait. This mutual emergence is investigated archaeologically at the kod on Pulu islet which is owned and operated by the Goemulgal people of nearby Mabuyag island. Multiple radiocarbon dates from shell and bone shrines and an underlying village midden indicate that the kod, and by association the Goemulgal and their totemic clan and moiety system, emerged over the past 400 years. Aided by local oral history and ethnography, it is argued further that establishment of the kod saw the status of Pulu change from a residential to a ceremonial and sacred place.

This article develops a novel method for assessing the cultural context of rock art, and applies it to the rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic of France and Spain. The article relies on a generative approach, assuming that artists have the potential to choose which motifs to select from the repertoire or vocabulary of their artistic system, but that appropriate choices at any place are guided by the location of that site within the culturally-mediated geography of the region. Ethnographic studies of rock art depicting animal species produced in the contexts of totemism, shamanism and everyday life are used as reference points in an analytical framework, which is then applied to a number of ancient traditions.

In the early days of anthropology, indigenous concepts of animating essences and the cross-cutting nature of the life-force, expressed in such terms as hau and mana, were front and centre in the ethnographic literature (e.g. Mauss 1954; 1975; Malinowski 1922; 1936; 1948). Branded as ‘mystical’, ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ for more than a generation, however, such potentially key conceptual sites of alterity have only recently begun to be revisited and recuperated within anthropology and in other fields such as material culture studies and cognitive sciences. The articles in this special issue of CAJ consider what archaeology might contribute to the general theoretical discussion on animism and alternative ontologies. As a set, they offer a diversity of perspectives on how the recognition of animism as a prevalent theme within contemporary indigenous worlds can affect archaeological analysis and interpretation. They also offer ideas about how attending to the significance of such concepts may provide new analytical purchase on alternative ontologies and ways of constructing, dissolving, or transforming traditional dichotomies that continue to powerfully shape our worlds.

Animists' theories of matter must be given equivalence at the level of theory if we are to understand adequately the nature of ontological difference in the past. The current model is of a natural ontological continuum that connects all cultures, grounding our culturally relativist worldviews in a common world. Indigenous peoples' worlds are thought of as fascinating but ultimately mistaken ways of knowing the world. We demonstrate how ontologically oriented theorists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold in conjuncture with an anti-representationalist methodology can provide the necessary conditions for alternative ontologies to emerge in archaeology. Anthropo-zoomorphic ‘body-pots’ from first-millennium ad northwest Argentina anticipate the possibility that matter was conceptualized as chronically unstable, inherently undifferentiated, and ultimately practice-dependent.

Ethnohistoric sources suggest that the indigenous inhabitants of Andean South America saw both people and things as animated or enlivened by a common vital force (camaquen). In approaching the subject of camaquen archaeologically, I attempt to place objects and their materiality at the analytical centre, rather than the normally privileged ethnohistoric or ethnographic data, in order to see what new insights into the nature of Pre-Columbian ontologies might be gained from ‘thinking through things’. In this, I follow recent theories premised on the idea that the traditional segregation of concepts and things may hinder understanding of alternative worlds. The study focuses specifically on the arrangements, relationality and referentiality between and among objects found in sacred and offering contexts dating to the Inca period.

A major focus of inter-disciplinary debate has been the need to bridge the Cartesian divide between people as active subjects and inert passive objects, to better reflect how things provoke and resist human actions through their ‘secondary agency’. Many Central Andean people express a deep concern about their relationship with places and things, which they communicate with through daily work and rituals involving ‘sympathetic magic’. A consideration of Andean animism emphasizes how agency is located in the social relationship people have with the material world and how material objects can have social identities.

The shamanistic interpretation of hunter-gatherer rock arts has in recent years been heavily criticized. Much of this criticism draws on some of the same fundamental flaws in the shamanistic approach to understanding rock arts. In this article I briefly outline what it is about shamanism and its use in rock-art research that both sides of the debate have got wrong. Taking southern African hunter-gatherer rock art as a starting point, I demonstrate a new way of understanding rock art is indeed possible. I then explore the possibilities of this approach by examining rock art from the post Palaeolithic in Spain, and the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe.

This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the world, which in turn provides new insights into the local mode of perceiving and engaging with the material world. The case of household spirits and human relationship with buildings is taken as an example. The archaeological material discussed in the article derives from the seventeenth-century town of Tornio in northern Finland.

Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of the Andes are rich with descriptions of animated landscapes, substances and objects. It is widely held that these beliefs have deep roots in the pre-Columbian past, and archaeological literature on the Andes routinely draws upon these sources describing the religious importance of mountains, water, plants and animals. While this generalized sense of animism in prehistory is accepted, locating animism archaeologically presents more of a challenge, and like investigations into religion and ritual more broadly, often focuses on special object categories. Spectacular items of fine-quality, exotic materials, or restricted circulation are singled out as ‘special’ by archaeologists, while objects such as plain pots or tools are interpreted as mundanely functional. Further, animistic interpretations that lean heavily on ethnographic analogy run the risk of simply identifying traits in the past which match up with accounts from more recent times. Using materials from the Wari site of Conchopata in the central Andes of Peru, I take up the idea of animism as a ‘relational epistemology’ (Bird-David 1999). This view repositions animism as something that arises out of an ongoing engagement between humans and the world they inhabit rather than as a set of beliefs. This move begins to dissolve the categories of sacred and profane that are embedded in historical studies of religion. Recent shifts in archaeological approaches to ritual provide methodological frameworks for exploring how mundane objects may be transformed into sacred and further allow us to interrogate changes in practice and highlight variation in how animism was deployed in specific locales concurrent with larger social changes.

Despite great variability in archaeological and ethnographic material culture across North America, a handful of objects are ubiquitous in assemblages of different ages and geographies. These index objects are clues to ontological principles, such as animacy, that guide the interactions between Native Americans and the material world. The impact of relational ontologies on the formation of heterogeneous archaeological assemblages may be evaluated through analyses of index objects and contextual associations. To this effect, this article presents the outline of an assemblage-based relational taxonomy, where spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions are combined with object biographies, interactive roles, and social relations.

Both present academic theories and local native peoples' beliefs and practices are the result of complex colonial histories, and sometimes even evolved in curious interactions. Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that scientific and local native theories are usually on opposite sides of the colonial border. In this article I explore the colonial and decolonizing potential of the ‘animistic turn’ in archaeology, focusing on my own trajectory of research. Following Latin American post-colonial writers on ‘border thinking’ (thinking from the border instead of about it), my account here can be described, in short, as a move from research on animism to research from animism.

In commenting on the preceding articles of the Special Section, this afterword elaborates on the methodological and analytical implications for archaeology of the ontological alterity of animist phenomena. If such phenomena are challenging because they transgress the conceptual coordinates of archaeologists' habitual interpretive repertoires (mind vs matter, materiality vs culture, etc.), then what might archaeology's response to such challenges be, what might be distinctively archaeological about it, and how might it compare to related concerns among socio-cultural anthropologists and philosophers?