The distinction between clean and unclean, often associated with bodily functions, is a common feature of human societies. Consequently, diverse groups developed different ways of maintaining separation between the realms. Despite its prominence in many ethnographies and in anthropology at large, and although the spatial expression of this separation is susceptible to archaeological enquiry, the concept of purity had received less attention by archaeologists. The completion of the excavation of a large house at Tel ʿEton supplied us with detailed information on household life and practices in Iron Age Israel. The finds from this house, along with a very large archaeological dataset about Iron Age Israelite society at large and the wealth of textual data from this period, give us insights into the practices associated with purity/impurity. The article reconstructs how Iron Age Israelite society coped with the implications of impurity (mainly women during menstruation) in its daily life, how impurity was contained, and offers a reconstruction of the ritual that accompanied the change of status from impure to pure.

Exploring the long-term use of accounting practices and currencies by literate and numerate authorities contributes new information regarding the complexity of the political economy of ancient Maya society. Two forms of indirect, yet compelling, lines of evidence for accounting practices and currencies are presented in this article. First, we identify potential accounting devices (counting sticks and tokens) found in the tombs of royal scribes and nobles, based on the contextual associations and depicted uses of similar objects in Maya art such as polychrome vases and murals. Second, we argue that the long-term use and significant standardization of specific shell objects suggests their role as all-purpose monies, in addition to their complementary status as counting devices or numerical symbols. This paper addresses the intricate relationships between symbolism, value and multiple modes of exchange that have long been of interest to cross-cultural studies in anthropology.

The production and use of Loro ceramics in the Middle Horizon (c. ad 650–1000) south coast of Peru persisted during a period of cultural conflict as the highland Wari empire annexed this region. Primarily residing in the Las Trancas valley, just beyond the locus of Wari control, the Loro developed tight ethnic bonds and seem to have maintained autonomy for the duration of the empire's presence. Loro ceramics embody the culture's development of a local identity, particularly evident in face-neck jars, one-handled vessels consisting of a modelled human head atop a globular body. With standardized facial features, a range of reductive motifs and a tendency toward female representation, Loro face-neck jars contrast markedly with similar Wari vessels depicting individuals dressed in elite male costume and bearing symbols of Wari state religion. A significant percentage of Loro face-neck jars are sexed or gendered female, an unusual occurrence in Andean visual culture. This article frames these objects within Andean constructs of gender complementarity, arguing that Loro female face-neck jars visually declared their gendered opposition to Wari, protecting their autonomy through the implicit acquiescence and complementarity of femininity.

Assemblage is a concept common to a number of academic disciplines, most notably archaeology and art, but also geology and palaeontology. Archaeology can claim a special link to the term assemblage, though novel approaches to the concept of assemblage have recently been adopted from the fields of philosophy and political theory. These approaches, bracketed under the term ‘new materialism’, are discussed here. The introduction to this collection of papers outlines these approaches and evaluates their usefulness for archaeological practice and interpretation.

The art of Neolithic Britain and Ireland consists of a variety of curvilinear and geometric motifs pecked into stone (in open-air rock art or passage tombs) or carved into portable artefacts of chalk, stone or antler. Because of its abstract nature the art has proved problematic for archaeologists. Initially archaeologists assumed the art was representational; now most scholars have abandoned this view, and simply approach the art stylistically. Here I argue that stylistic analysis is insufficient to understand this art: instead the process of making provides a fuller understanding of this art. It is argued that the practice of assemblage is a key aspect of the process of making.

This article argues that artefact types and typologies are kinds of assemblages, presenting an explicitly relational interpretation of typology grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. In the process it evaluates recent approaches to typology, and the interpretations these typologies have supported, and compares these with approaches which emphasize materiality and experience. It then illustrates the benefit of drawing these two angles of analysis closer together within an approach grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. Throughout, the discussion revolves around British Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burials and types of artefacts commonly found within them. The core argument is that, if used appropriately, typologies are not constraints to the appreciation of distinctiveness, difference and relationality in the past, but can rather form an important tool in detecting those relations and making sense of different past ways of becoming.

In this paper the notion of assemblage, as derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze, is explored in order to consider change in prehistory. An assemblage-based approach that draws on the concept of ‘vibrant matter’ is implemented as the means of understanding change. In this approach all materials are viewed as vibrant and in flux. These ideas are used to create a heterogeneous view of change where assemblages, or parts of assemblages, may change at varying speeds and rhythms and at many different scales. These ideas are explored through the case study of changing burial practices between 3000 and 1500 cal bc on the Isle of Man. I suggest that this kind of thinking allows us to study change differently, and explore the advantages of this approach for archaeology.

The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the ‘great processes’ of change like the evolution of humanity, the colonization of the globe or the origins of agriculture, and focusing on the momentary, fleeting nature of a small-scale ethnographic present. Where archaeologists have attempted to integrate different scales the result has usually been to turn to Annales-influenced or time perspectivism-driven approaches and their fixed, linear and ontologically incompatible layers of history. In contrast, I will use assemblages to examine how we can rethink both the emergence of multiple scales and their role in history, without reducing the differences of the small-scale to an epiphenomenal outcome of larger events, or treating large-scale historical processes as mere reifications of the ‘real’ on-the-ground stuff of daily life. As we will see, this approach also has consequences for the particular kind of reality we accord to large-scale archaeological categories.

The religious temperature of post-Reformation early modern England was constantly over-heating. Given that Protestant belief was frequently challenged by residual dissent, religious identity of whatever kind was crucial to both individual and parochial cosmological understanding. Hence, the many spatial, sensory, material and performative changes which were visited on parish churches over this period were designed to shape and redirect belief, but could also act to confuse believers. In order to penetrate this mass of religious reaction and response, I employ Assemblage Theory, particularly that of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, whose thinking is currently strongly influential amongst archaeologists. Using her work on the vitality of matter and the importance of the assemblage as a phenomenon containing material, non-material and human components, I apply a selection of her ideas to diagnostic elements of being and belief visible in the religious activities and materiality of the early modern parish church. While I refrain from discussing particular human individuals or groups, my chosen examples are intended to foreground the ontology of early modern parishioners, their perception of their hierarchical status within Anglican cosmology, their territorial conceptions of religious space and the workings of time as seen through the sequential assemblages of monumental tombs. Following Bennett, but departing from the current archaeological concentration on the primacy of materiality, this essay is designed to plug some of the people-shaped holes which are sometimes left unfilled by their surrounding material networks.

New discoveries from a Californian cave have found a remarkable assemblage of cached perishable and other artefacts. Comprised of baskets, cordage, bone, antler, leather, food residues and other materials, the assemblages are dispersed through four caves in the largest ever cache discovered in the borderland region attributable to the native Californian linguistic group known as the Chumash. This paper develops a methodology based upon DeLanda's philosophy of assemblages and Graeber's anthropological theory of value. Importantly, following Normark, it is argue that assemblage theory needs to be operationalized into a methodological approach in order to apply it archaeologically. This methodology illustrate how a capacity analysis of the Cache Cave assemblage relates to values within the society which cached it by revealing the relational capacities within assemblages and relative capacities between them. Importantly, as a scalable approach, capacity analysis allows the investigation of the heterogeneous dynamics within complex societies.

Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of assemblage, but in more recent years they have started problematizing it in interesting and innovative ways, beyond its common connotations of aggregation. Sociologists such as Manuel DeLanda and political philosophers such as Jane Bennett have been key influences in this move. These authors had adapted and modified the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In this article, an assemblage of sorts itself, I propose that we need to return to that original Deleuzian body of thinking and explore its richness further. Assemblages, temporary and deliberate heterogeneous arrangements of material and immaterial elements, are about the relationship of in-betweenness. I further suggest that sensoriality and affectivity, memory and multi-temporality are key features of assemblage thinking, and that assemblages also imply certain political effects. The omission of these features in the archaeological treatments of the concept may lead to mechanistic reincarnations of systems thinking, thus depriving the concept of its potential. Finally, I explore these ideas by considering communal eating and feasting events as powerful sensorial assemblages.

This contribution contrasts ‘Assemblage theory’ with more traditional archaeological understandings of the term ‘assemblage’. It is argued that the flat ontology of assemblage theory is productive, particularly in relation to scale, enabling archaeologists to describe their own materials more precisely. However, more traditional ‘assemblages’, perhaps as a result of the more restrictive view they provide, should not be neglected, as they generate particularly archaeological perspectives and effects.

This paper provides a commentary on the other contributions to this special section. It offers an extended reflection on some emergent themes in this collection, themes which resonate with my own perspective on assemblage theory. Two issues in particular are addressed: typology and time.

I'm standing in front of a ‘painting’ by Niki de Saint Phalle called ‘Green Sky’. It happens that I'm standing in front of it in Tokyo where the intense nihon-spectral activity on my eu-retina might indeed make the sky green.