This article investigates the shaping of place through memory and emotion. In particular it explores how, by engaging with particular kinds of materials, people texture locales in ways which help to structure future actions. By examining the manner in which deceased human bodies were engaged with at the British Neolithic site of Hambledon Hill, this article argues that we can trace the creation of these mnemonic and emotional geographies and so add to our understanding of how and why traditions of practice, including the deposition of human bone, were maintained through time.

The Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland disappeared as a cultural entity in the early nineteenth century. Prior to this, the Beothuk had few direct interactions with Europeans, and those that occurred were generally of a hostile nature. As a result, very little is known about Beothuk religious life. Drawing on available ethnohistoric records, an analysis of burial site locations and funerary objects, we offer an interpretation of Beothuk sacred cosmology that places birds at the centre of their belief system.

The interpretation of the Royal Graves at Ur, Mesopotamia, by their excavator, Sir Leonard Woolley, has long been accepted. Woolley implies that the people sacrificed along with the dynasts went willingly to their deaths out of loyalty, devotion, and faith in the dead monarchs; but other interpretations are plausible. One is that these graves are the remains of dramas portraying a ‘public transcript’ played out in a public theatre of cruelty staged by rulers claiming divine status. State power united with supernatural authority can create extraordinarily powerful ‘sacred or divine kingdoms’; but ‘sacred’ or ‘divine’ kings need continuous contact with the supernatural and affirmation of their divinity. They are obliged to practise acts of public mystification, of which the Royal Graves appear to be examples. Ur's kings may indeed have been strong and their subjects loyal, but it is equally likely that they were weak and vulnerable and that they practised ritual sacrifice to terrorize a restive citizenry and convince themselves and others of their right to rule. Other examples of public transcripts made manifest in state-sponsored theatres of cruelty confirm that the Royal Graves at Ur are not unique but represent a phenomenon of wider historical generality.

While there is growing agreement within anthropology and archaeology that notions of ‘experience’ can contribute to our interpretations of the past, this article suggests that there is a need to incorporate insight gathered from the fields of cultural phenomenology and cultural neuro-phenomenology into general anthropological understandings of cross-cultural religious experience. Specifically, this article explores the insight offered by cultural neuro-phenomenology into the relationships between religious symbolism, ritual, power, religious belief, and individual religious experience. In assessing the role that belief, as instantiated through ritually-induced religious experience, plays in the maintenance or alteration of state-level religious systems, this article will outline the ways in which this insight may both help us better to understand past religious experience as well as to interpret the maintenance and alteration of past religious systems. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, this article will conclude with a brief discussion of the fall of the Classic Maya state religious system.

In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 bp and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 bp. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means. It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

Concerned with the ‘meaning’, variability and material transformation of the sacred oboo cairns of Inner Asia, this study focuses upon four of these stone settings within the environs of Mergen Monastery. Two have been rebuilt since their destruction during the Cultural Revolution, and one markedly registers its recent history. The layout of these complex monuments (involving diverse ancillary elements) reflects the processes of Buddhicization of the landscape. Comparison between their form and Buddhist texts outlining oboo construction allows appraisal of their prescription and actuality. These monuments raise issues relevant beyond their immediate cultural and geographical context, as they express an interplay between history and ‘timelessness’; the latter effectively amounting to a ‘reincarnation’ of material culture (i.e. denial of change). Finally, the deployment of oboos relates to broader concepts of landscape orientation; their relationship with Mongolian directional systems is explored.

Time and temporality have been at the centre of a number of accounts of burial practices in the Bronze Age of Britain in the last twenty years. Up to now, however, the temporality of practice has been taken as an indication of past understandings of time and/or the ancestors. In this article I wish to argue that the temporality of mortuary practices was not merely reflective of understandings of time, but in fact was constitutive of them, and that through the changing temporality of mortuary practices, people's engagement with monuments themselves was changed. These changing temporalities were driven by the transition from inhumation to cremation as the dominant mode of disposal of the dead. By invoking chaînes opératoires for each mode, I will demonstrate the underlying similarities and differences of the two rites, showing how cremation led to a fundamental change in the temporality of mortuary behaviour, and as such created new understandings of funerary monuments and place.

The island of Sri Lanka, situated off the tip of southern India, is often perceived as the recipient of material culture diffused from more northerly regions. This article counters this model by suggesting that Sri Lanka may have played a pivotal role in the development of Brahmi, South Asia's earliest readable script. Sherds inscribed with this script, recently found at Anuradhapura, with dates of the beginning of the fourth century BC, now represent its earliest dated examples anywhere in the subcontinent. By analyzing the sherds' archaeological and scriptural context it presents a tentative mechanism for Brahmi's development and spread through South Asia and concludes by discussing the dynamic relationships between scripts, langtiage, material culture and ethnic division within Sri Lanka.

Narratives of human evolution place considerable emphasis upon human cognitive development resulting from the evolution of brain architecture and witnessed by the production of ‘symbolic’ material culture. Recent work has modified the narrative to the extent that cognitive development is treated as the product of humanity's ability to download certain aspects of brain functionality, such as the storage of information, into external media. This article questions the centrality given to the history of brain architecture as determinate of human cognition by rejecting the widespread assumption that cognition trades in representations, either stored internally in the brain or downloaded externally into cultural media. The alternative, offered here, is that human cognitive development was constructed through the development of joint attention made possible by the anatomical development of hominins and that this sustained a shared empathy between social agents in their practical understanding of the qualities of materiality.

Forty-four radiocarbon results are now available from the Ascott-under-Wychwood long barrow, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Three alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. In our preferred model, pre-barrow occupation including small timber structures and a midden was followed by a gap long enough to allow a turfline to form. Cists and the primary barrow were then initiated and the first human remains inserted into the cists; there was subsequently a secondary extension to the barrow. In the Bayesian model for this interpretation, occupation goes back to the fortieth century cal. bc, the midden being quite short-lived in the latter part of the fortieth or first part of the thirty-ninth century cal. bc. The gap was very probably not less than 50 years long, in the latter part of the thirty-ninth century cal. bc and the first half of the thirty-eighth century cal. bc. The barrow was begun between 3760–3695 cal. bc and extended in 3745–3670 cal. bc, probably within a generation. The first bodies were inserted in 3755–3690 cal. bc, contemporaneously with the primary barrow, and the last remains were probably deposited in the 3640s or 3630s cal. bc. The use of the monument probably did not exceed three to five generations. In an alternative interpretation of the sequence, greater continuity is seen between the underlying timber structures and midden on the one hand and the cists on the other, which could have preceded the initiation of the barrow itself. The Bayesian model for this interpretation suggests the gap between occupation and barrow was much shorter, probably of only 1–40 years' duration. It gives slightly different other estimates for the sequence but agrees with the main model in suggesting an overall short span of use for the whole monument. In a third interpretation, some of the human remains are interpreted as older than the cists and barrow. The Bayesian model for this again gives slightly different estimates but suggests that such putatively ancestral remains would not have been more than a decade or two older than the initiation of cists and barrow. Results are briefly discussed in relation to the overall sequence from occupation and midden to monument, the brevity of monument use, and issues of remembrance.

This article examines the role of mortuary practice in the emergence (c. ad 1050–1100) of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian Native American city north of Mexico. The parallel partitioning of human and gastropod bodies in ridge-top mortuary mounds is examined and I argue that the presence of gastropods buried alongside human bodies served to connect the living world of humans with the watery underworld of the dead. From a microhistorical perspective, this paper focuses on the processing and deposition of bodies and their subsequent interment in ridge-top burials to parse the potential relationships between such mortuary practice and Cahokia's emergence as a complex polity. The paper presents data on the association of shell materials with human bodies from six previously excavated ridge-tops for comparison with new data on shell materials and human burials from Wilson Mound, a small ridge-top located on the western edge of Cahokia. Together, these data suggest the emergence of Cahokia was embedded in newly articulated relationships with persons enacted through the process of disarticulating the dead for burial mediated with mollusc shell.

The key argument presented in this article is that a threefold temporal sequence can be recognized in the deployment of cup and ring marks and that these changes can throw new light on the nature of ideological evolution in northern Britain during the Neolithic. It is proposed that the initial phase relates to the symbolic portrayal of the ideological beliefs which constituted the ‘Neolithic’ (c. 4000–3200 BC) by mapping them on the landscape via outcropping bedrock. During the second phase (c. 3200–2000 BC) the significance of this symbolism is thought to be appropriated, as it is reworked into ‘man-made’ megalithic constructions which ‘monumentalize’ the landscape under the aegis of increasingly overt human control. By the third phase (c. 2000–1800 BC) a disjuncture is apparent in both the function and meaning of the cup and ring tradition culminating in its expropriation as human control of the natural world becomes more fixed.

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.

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.

While exceedingly rare on any given archaeological site, engraved stone artefacts have nonetheless been reported from sites covering a range of periods and regions across the world. Attempts to interpret such engravings have often focused on potential representational or communicative functions, including their role in notational systems, symbolic depiction, and the development of early forms of writing. Contextual and microscopic investigation of a number of engraved artefacts discovered in a large assemblage of dolerite artefacts excavated from a Neolithic hilltop habitation and stone-tool production site in south India suggests, however, that an alternative interpretation of engraved stone artefacts is possible. Drawing on ethnographic evidence concerning the perception of stone, and particularly natural markings on stone, this article argues that the stone pieces on which the marks were engraved were more than just passive surfaces for the creation of unrelated signs. Instead, engravings appear to draw on natural features within and upon the surface of the dolerite, and to suggest an appreciation for the patterns of nature, as well as a lack of distinction between anthropogenic and natural markings. It is argued that the engravings may have been a response to a perceived 'life-force' within the dolerite. The fact that they were produced and then broken apart by knapping suggests that they may have been made to accentuate or attenuate a power that was perceived as either somehow beneficial or in need of careful control.

Few subjects have excited the imagination of archaeologists working in ancient complex societies as have monumentality and urban planning. Yet the two topics are rarely explicitly theorized in a sustained integrated investigation within a single study, despite the fact that monumental architecture is often considered a primary basis for identifying the presence of urban planning. This article makes the related methodological arguments that both phenomena benefit from a more full consideration of one another, and that the meaningful aspect of monumentality and urban symbology needs to be considered in conjunction with the formal aspect of monuments and urban layouts. These positions are then implemented in a study of the Syro-Anatolian city-state system that existed in the ancient Near East during the early first millennium bc. The capital cities of these polities were characterized by a program of monumentality that brought royalty, city walls, gates and monumental sculpture into an unmistakable constellation of associations. The consistency of this pattern of monumentality and urban form suggests that at least a degree of urban planning existed.

Many ancient city sites display a remarkable regularity in their plan which has led to considerable debate on the symbolism and intentionality which may lie behind these arrangements. Grid plan cities of the Greek and Roman world were discussed by Haverfield almost a century ago, but it was above all the cities of South and East Asia analyzed by Wheatley in his influential Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971) which has given new emphasis to the potential of meaning and significance. Such planned cities necessarily incorporate an essential tension between praxis — the practical day-to-day needs of the urban community — and idealism, the desire to impose on those practical concerns a city-plan which expresses a symbolic or cosmological image. Contemporary texts, where they exist, may help towards an answer, but the physicality of the city plan itself provides the crucial ground for argument as to whether symbolic or ideological imperatives governed the actual outcome. Cities may be conceptualized in ideal terms without ever taking on the physical attributes of any ideal form. The contributors to this Viewpoint approach the issue from a diversity of standpoints and with reference to different geographical areas. Were cities built as images? Did powerful belief systems combined with strong centralized control give rise to cities where the moat represented the encircling sea and the raised cathedral the mountain-dwelling of the gods? Or are such readings more the product of Western analysis and wishful thinking than the original intentions of their builders? The discussion here is opened by an architectural historian, who places city-planning firmly within the Western intellectual tradition, and considers it in particular as a product of Greek geometry. A series of regional specialists then take up the baton and assess the evidence for symbolic city planning in Egypt, the Roman world, South and Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. How far did cities of the Classical world conform to ideas set out by Aristotle and Vitruvius? Were the regulations of the Artashastra really adopted as a practical guide for city lay-out in South Asia? The balance of evidence — of what may have been intended, against what was actually laid out on the ground — provides fertile ground for a stimulating diversity of opinions.

The Trypillia megasites of the Ukrainian forest steppe formed the largest fourth-millennium bc sites in Eurasia and possibly the world. Discovered in the 1960s, the megasites have so far resisted all attempts at an understanding of their social structure and dynamics. Multi-disciplinary investigations of the Nebelivka megasite by an Anglo-Ukrainian research project brought a focus on three research questions: (1) what was the essence of megasite lifeways? (2) can we call the megasites early cities? and (3) what were their origins? The first question is approached through a summary of Project findings on Nebelivka and the subsequent modelling of three different scenarios for what transpired to be a different kind of site from our expectations. The second question uses a relational approach to urbanism to show that megasites were so different from other coeval settlements that they could justifiably be termed ‘cities'. The third question turns to the origins of sites that were indeed larger and earlier than the supposed first cities of Mesopotamia and whose development indicates that there were at least two pathways to early urbanism in Eurasia.

In the last few decades, archaeologists have increasingly studied the material expression of religion. At the same time, they have recognized that some objects are animate in ways similar to people. Building on previous research that combines studies of religion, object agency and behavioural perspectives, we present an approach that focuses on the variety of rituals, especially rites of passage, in which objects participate over the course of their life histories. Occurring in societies at all levels of organizational complexity, rites of passage offer archaeologists an opportunity to contribute to the anthropology of ritual and an understanding of the ways that some objects take on, or are given, attributes of life. More subtly, by comparing the rites of passage of objects and the people who interact with them, we can assess differences in the specific qualities of object and human agency. These approaches may help us to orient the search for archaeological evidence of rites of passage as well as to interpret enigmatic deposits such as caches, hoards and offerings.

The interest in the study of the body that is emerging in European archaeologies has not yet penetrated Americanist approaches to prehistoric iconography. Nevertheless, American materials provide an excellent data base with which to work. This article employs the complex human representational imagery of the Moche (Peruvian North Coast, c.AD 100–800) to explore how the body was situated within the context of ritual sacrifice. Employing both the Foucauldian concept of the disciplined body and the work of Mary Douglas, two forms of bodily representation are discussed: the naked male prisoner and the spread-eagled female sacrifice. These bodies are defined iconographically not only by their sex, but also by their qualities of anonymity or individuality. While the sacrificed female represents an individual who is notable because of who she is (i.e. who she embodies), the male prisoners represent an undifferentiated and anonymous group. These two examples suggest that the body can be read as an individual symbolic field (the female body) and, alternatively, can serve as an undifferentiated forum (the bodies of prisoners) for sacrificial discourse. Despite these differences in representation, both forms of the body present potentially liminal sites within the context of sacrificial ritual. This liminality is essential for the discursive re-ordering of the body politic to occur.