The corpus of figurines from Çatalhöyük has attracted the attention of diverse audiences but there has been an overwhelming focus on a selection of female figurines, many of which lack exact provenience. Excavation from 1961 to 1965 yielded more mundane examples classifiable as anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and abbreviated forms. New work attempts to balance the picture through various methods and strategies. The research presented here collates the artefacts from these early seasons with those retrieved from 1993 to 2006 to gain a fuller understanding of figurine practice. The figurines almost exclusively represent secondary deposition. We can now assess the number and type of figurines deposited in buildings, middens, burials and elsewhere. Reassessment of the entire corpus has prompted interrogation of the category of ‘figurine’ and reconsideration of the taxonomies along with other artefacts and image production at Çatalhöyük. Depositional practices at the site suggest processes of mobility and circulation that have rarely been considered in studies of figurines. Typical ‘representational’ or aesthetic approaches imply that the figurines were a special category with particular values of religiosity and gender; but attention to the archaeological context can imply meaning from the material practices within which ‘figurines’ were enmeshed.

In 2002, an investigation into the rock art of Waanyi country was undertaken in conjunction with ongoing archaeological excavation. Various subjects, styles and techniques were documented, associated oral history from Waanyi elders was recorded and the relationship to archaeological deposits was assessed. A large number of rainbow-like designs, in red or red-and-yellow, were recorded, along with a magnificent and very large red-and-yellow Rainbow Serpent. These and other images are discussed in relation to the travels of Ancestral Beings, stories and uses of coloured pigment and the use of local stone for both tools and the situating of important spiritual sites. Links to a network of other communities across northern and central Australia are highlighted. It is concluded that colour played a fundamental role in both expressing and maintaining relationships to places, Ancestral Beings and other groups of people. Important local differences can be seen in comparison to the ways in which colour has been used by Aboriginal people elsewhere. The research highlights ways in which the study of colour can prove valuable to archaeology globally.

Although archaeologists have become increasingly interested in disaster, collapse and regeneration, there has been insufficient attention paid to the social and psychological impact of disasters. Disasters can stimulate far-reaching religious changes. This article is a case study of the fall of the Middle Sicán polity of northern Peru (ad 900–1100) that draws on both archaeology and oral tradition. Middle Sicán cosmology was centred on the Sicán Deity, which did not survive the polity's collapse. The god's demise and the revitalization movement that followed the Middle Sicán can only be understood by considering both how many of the people of the region conceptualized their world and the disasters that occurred.

Archaeological excavations in 2002–3 at Hattab II Cave in northwestern Morocco revealed an undisturbed Late Palaeolithic Iberomaurusian human burial. This is the first Iberomaurusian inhumation discovered in the region. The skeleton is probably that of a male aged between 25 and 30 years. The individual shows a characteristic absence of the central upper incisors reported in other Iberomaurusian burials. Accompanying the burial are a stone core and a number of grave goods including bone points, a marine gastropod and a gazelle horn core. Thermoluminescence dating of a burnt stone artefact in association with the burial has provided an age of 8900?1100 bp. This is one of the youngest ages reported for the Iberomaurusian and raises questions about persistence of hunter-gatherer societies in the Maghreb and the potential for continuity in burial practices with the earliest Neolithic.

Cosmological models are common in Mayanist settlement studies. In such models, causeways are often said to follow various cosmological principles that are more or less the same from the Middle Formative to the present time. The models have been created by merging disparate data from ethnography, ethnohistory, iconography, epigraphy and archaeology into a single form where all the parts are determined by a common principle. The Terminal Classic triadic causeways at Ichmul, Yucatan, Mexico, could potentially be interpreted with such cosmological models. The evidence, however, does not fit these models. It is proposed, instead, with reference to the philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, that settlement studies should focus only on what is present at the site without reliance on transcendent concepts such as culture or cosmology. The triadic causeways at Ichmul are seen as virtual processes that have the potential to become actual forms at every present moment.

Archaeological investigations at three Formative period sites near San Martín Tilcajete in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, have recovered a sequence of temples. The temples span the period when the Zapotec state emerged with its capital at Monte Albán during the Late Monte Albán I phase (300–100 bc), coinciding with Monte Albán's conquest of neighbouring regions. Zapotec rituals of sanctification practised in pre-state times may have been affected by Monte Albán's military expansionism. The historically documented case of military expansion and political unification of the Hawaiian islands by the paramount, Kamehameha, shows similarities in the adoption of ideology and religious institutions. Among them are the establishment of standardized temples and the ascendance of a militaristic ideology and ritual order attuned to the early state rulers' coercive authority.