Since the 1980s, archaeologists have challenged the idea that prehistoric actions were guided primarily by practicality and expedience. Rubbish disposal, a superficially mundane activity, provides a critical case for exploring the depth to which cultural logics penetrate. Ethnoarchaeological research on discard behaviour in Mesoamerican houselots has modelled rubbish disposal as a matter of expedience predictable by factors such as density of settlement and length of occupation. At the Classic period site of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, such models based on practical reason succeed only partly in predicting the distribution of rubbish. Ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of rubbish in Mesoamerica suggest that fully understanding its distribution requires attention to cultural logics. At Chunchucmil, ancient Maya cosmology explains the location of dumps within households. Thus, both practical and cultural logics structured discard. The case of Maya subsistence farming suggests that practical logic is subsumed by cultural logic, rather than the two logics conflicting. These findings show how broadly-held beliefs and predispositions are instantiated and reproduced in daily life.

This article develops recent interpretations of mortuary practices as contexts for producing social memory and personhood to argue that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and genealogy. Commemorative strategies are identified in the composite character, shape and location of cairns and in their relationship with other commemorative monuments, namely Class I symbol-stones. The argument is developed through a consideration of the excavations of early medieval cists and cairns at Lundin Links in Fife.

Food items are not only food ‘for the body’, they are also ‘food for thought’ about our relations to ‘others’ in the world of living people, and to cosmological forces. Ethnographic studies and historical documents show a striking difference between Africa and the Near East with regard to symbolic elaborations of food-related items. This difference is grounded in a contrast between a cooking pot theme in Africa and a baking oven theme in the Near East. It is manifested in differences in the emergence of two fundamental cultural features generally assumed to be linked elements of the Neolithic, namely domestication of cereals and invention of pottery. In the Near East, the material shows that domesticated cereals appeared about 2000 years earlier than ceramics, while in Africa the evidence indicates that pottery appeared around 2000 years earlier than cultivated cereals. This article explores different social and symbolic correlates of the different sequences of Neolithic innovations in the Near East and Africa.

Decorated clay stamps carrying a culturally filtered range of abstract designs are one of the most visually striking but problematic categories of portable art found at Neolithic and Copper Age sites in western Asia and southern Europe. This article proposes a revised account of their production, consumption and changing values across space and time, by emphasizing their biographies, human relations and cultural embeddedness. They were sometimes worn as amulets, but primarily designed to be hand-held printing and impressing tools, used to reproduce copies of powerful graphic images on the surface of other cultural materials. It is argued that their potent signatures repeatedly attached, revealed and reproduced significant cultural concepts and relations across different people and practices and across the material and supernatural worlds.

It is now 25 years since Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (henceforth SSA) was first published in 1982. Why run a review feature upon a book this old? Clearly not to let readers know about its now-familiar contents. One justification is historical. Very few works have had such an effect — in archaeology, the nearest parallel comes with works such as Binford and Binford's New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968, which laid the basis for an entire agenda of New Archaeology. Like Binford and Binford's book, SSA marked a transformation of archaeology as much as, or more than, it actually transformed the field itself. It signalled the coming of age of a coherent cohort of young, energetic scholars with a strongly defined new agenda. It breached taken-for-granted limits with bold, even flagrant ambition; it consciously invoked new intellectual frames. As much as any particular publishing event can punctuate the scholarly process with the intimation of a new direction, the publication of SSA did so.

And yet, a review feature on the book would perhaps not be entirely justified as purely a historical retrospective. It is clear from the trajectory of theoretical publication in Britain (and to some extent America) over the last decades, from the content of archaeological theory courses in universities, and the vocabulary bounced around at conferences such as TAG and the SAAs, that the agenda of SSA — often termed ‘post-processualism’ — has become the dominant voice in mainstream archaeological theory. The challenger has become the establishment; the once-unthinkable has become normal science. There are many other theoretical voices, of course, but even self-proclaimed alternative movements show signs of having absorbed, osmotically, much of the theoretical agenda set by post-processualism, even if their answers differ.

Twenty-five is a human generation, and perhaps the closest approach to eternity in the rapidly fermenting world of theory; the current generation of students (future colleagues, really) will have known no other paradigm. Hence, we have asked our contributors not only to comment retrospectively upon the book itself, but also prospectively, on how well its agenda has weathered the years, on what roads remain untaken, and upon where they think the future might lie.