Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 bc). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy.

This article discusses contact, social relationships, and social organization between sites at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Euphrates valley; all of which are of high importance for reconstructing and modelling social organization in consolidated agricultural villages. Our analysis has succeeded in identifying a complex range of overlapping levels and types of social interaction that occurred simultaneously and operated at different scales including the household, the community and inter-regional communities. This complex mixture of interacting spheres, together with the identification of cultural-social boundaries, enables us to understand and explain inter-site variation in material culture and mortuary practices. Moreover, they reflect the growing social complexity of large farming communities at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the role played by settlement as the social unit through which these communities became more distinctive and self-consciously different.

During the past thirty years the Survey of Memphis and others have acquired more than two hundred borehole logs from the Capital Zone of Egypt. Combining these boreholes with maps and satellite images, we show that, during the past five thousand years, the geography of the Nile has been in constant flux with mean rates of migration around 2 m/y and one of its channels becoming extinct, by nature or through human intervention. Re-visiting ancient texts in the light of this changing environment, we show that the literary settings of both fictional and historical texts were real landscapes known to the authors. Hence we infer that ancient descriptions of landscape can be interpreted in a more literal way than before and that the authors were not as prone to writing of a metaphorical realm as was previously thought.

Petroglyph sites in the Yinshan and Helanshan ranges were documented during a recent survey. Archaeological remains indicate that these areas have for millennia been both militarized borders and osmotic trading zones connecting the pastoral people of northern Asia and the Chinese world. Petroglyphs form a significant part of the material and symbolic culture of this transitional zone from the Neolithic down to the later dynastic phases (nineteenth century). By using newly-gathered data, this article moves away from interpretations which see rock art as a wholly shamanistic phenomenon, introducing territory and iconography as key elements for the understanding of local geographies, cultural interactions, and the agencies of identity. The location of the sites indicates that petroglyphs were next to travel routes and may have served as territory markers and meeting places. In addition, the scattering of marked rocks in key locations suggests that petroglyphs were markers of identity essential for a people who were engaged in a dialectic contention with the expanding agricultural world. The sense of identity can be perceived also in the subject matter (wild and domesticated animals, hunting and herding scenes, faces) which seems to emphasize respect for, or even enjoyment of, pastoral and nomadic life.

In recent years, material culture studies have come to embrace contemporary Melanesia and European prehistory, but not classical archaeology and art. Prehistory is still thought, in many quarters, to be intrinsically more ‘ethnographic’ than historical periods; in this discourse, the Greeks (by default) become proto-modern individuals, necessarily opposed to Melanesian ‘dividuals’. Developments in the study of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the world of Homer should undermine such stark polarities. Historic and proto-historic archaeologies have rich potential for refining our notions both of agency and of personhood. This article argues that the forms of material entanglements we find in the Homeric poems, and the forms of agency (sensu Gell 1998) that we can observe in the archaeological record for the Early Iron Age of Greece (broadly 1000–500 bc) are of the same kind. The agency of objects structures Homeric narrative, and Homeric descriptions allow us precisely to define Homeric ‘human–thing entanglement’. This form of ‘material entanglement’ does not appear in the Aegean world before 1100 BC.

Archaeologists increasingly recognize a need to revise the scales at which we investigate identities such as gender, class and faction in ancient complex societies. In this article I present research on the expression of gender roles and ideologies in the performance of mortuary ritual in four distinctive residential areas of Classic Teotihuacan, including the urban compounds of La Ventilla 3, Tlajinga 33 and Tlailotlacan 6 and the hinterland settlement of Axotlan. Results indicate that gender was constructed and experienced differently across Teotihuacan society. This research demonstrates that multiscalar, comparative approaches to social identity make possible a fuller understanding of the significance of social heterogeneity in structuring early states.

This paper proposes that the organization of crafts may be a key catalyst in the emergence of urban communities. This is argued through a reassessment of finds from a non-ferrous metal workshop from the eighth century excavated in Ribe, Denmark. We analyse 3D laser scans in order to classify previously unidentified mould fragments, which show that the workshop produced a range of metal parts for composite products like wooden chests, belts and horse harnesses. Such production required an operational network, or réseau opératoire, to combine the necessary skills and expertise of several artisanal specializations. The need for collaboration between specialized craftspeople would have been a decisive incentive for the formation of permanent communities of an urban character. These observations point to a neglected bottom-up driver for the development of early urbanization.

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.

Traditional accounts of animals in Mesolithic Northwest Europe have ultimately been economic in character, with a particular focus of the larger ungulate species that formed the dietary mainstay. Smaller mammalian species, regularly grouped as ‘fur-bearing’ species, also play a role in such accounts, as the source of important non-nutritional materials, namely their fur. However, how has placing these species in this broad category impacted archaeology's interpretation of their remains in the Mesolithic? This paper argues economic categorization of these species has led to an automatic interpretation of their remains, which may overlook evidence for other uses and treatments. This research proposes that the remains of ‘fur-bearing’ species were not just waste products from fur extraction, but were also wrapped up in complex and meaningful human-nonhuman relationships, which impacted how these remains were treated, and ultimately shaped the archaeological record.

Shell mounds ceased to be built in many parts of coastal northern Australia about 800–600 years ago. They are the subject of stories told by Aboriginal people and some have been incorporated in ritual and political activities during the last 150 years. These understandings emerged only after termination of the economic and environmental system that created them, 800–600 years ago, in a number of widely separated coastal regions. Modern stories and treatments of these mounds by Aboriginal people concern modern or near-modern practices. Modern views of the mounds, their mythological and ritual associations, may be explained by reference to the socioeconomic transitions seen in the archaeological record; but the recent cultural, social and symbolic statements about these places cannot inform us of the process or ideology concerned with the formation of the mounds. Many Aboriginal communities over the last half a millennium actively formed understandings of new landscapes and systems of land use. Attempts to impose historic ideologies and cosmologies on earlier times fail to acknowledge the magnitude and rate of economic and ideological change on the tropical coastline of Australia.

This article examines the boundaries of clothing and the body in constructions of political identity in French colonial Louisiana. The study situates constructions of political identity among regulatory demands over the bodies of colonial subjects and the practices of taste and social distinction. It is argued that dress allowed colonial subjects to move into political spaces usually occupied by European colonizers. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and visual data are used to investigate how French colonizers attempted to construct a body politic by regulating dress and the bodies of colonial subjects, while colonial ‘others’ attempted to constitute themselves as political bodies through self-fashioning.

New developments in the natural sciences are contributing to new thinking on the nature of matter, materiality and being. Such re-visioning of the natural world is, in part, responsible for ‘the ontological turn’, a trend clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. In combination with evolving relational and symmetrical approaches to investigating the constitution of ‘the social’, the door is open for exploring logics, taxonomies and understandings of reality different from our own in studies of the past. Applying these ideas to the investigation of early imperialism, this paper offers an analysis of a key element in the repertoire of Inca material culture that forwards the importance of human–thing relations in the context of early state politics. Working from the basis of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage, the study examines how these objects were deployed in the task of empire-building and what insights they provide into Andean ontological commitments during the late pre-Columbian period. An argument is developed that imperial pots were construed as animate beings and agents of the State. The study brings to the fore the mutually constituted nature of the imperial Inca project and suggests new avenues for future research that highlight the matter of early empires.

The old are rarely the focus of research in archaeology. Older skeletonized bodies are hard to give a chronological age, and this seems to justify the lack of research focus. In this paper I argue that the old are not naturally invisible to archaeologists, but have been made so by a focus on chronology at the expense of the bodily and by our ambivalence towards the ageing process. I suggest that, rather than applying numbers to skeletons, we should focus our research on understanding the ageing of the body itself in archaeological contexts, and the relationships between processes of continuity and processes of decline. This is achieved through analysis of four aspects of embodied ageing: changes in appearance; in bodily function; in age-related disease; and in skill. The ageing body is not invisible: it is present, variable and a rich resource for future archaeological analyses.

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.

The study of non-hierarchical forms of social organization occupies a prominent place in the European Iron Age research. This paper explores the application of Pierre Clastres political anthropology to the study of the Iron Age. The approach of this study to the Iron Age focuses on the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. It was an area that experienced social changes from 1000 bc to the first century bc–first century ad, from the Bronze Age to the Roman conquest. Using the archaeological record of the northwest Iberian peninsula as a case study, the paper tries to show the potential benefits of applying Clastres’ ideas to the interpretation of European societies from the Iron Age: overcoming, thanks to the application of the concept of non-coercive power, the false and increasingly frequent image of non-hierarchical societies and introducing new ways of explaining social complexity that are not based on economic criteria.

This article addresses the visual culture of the Neolithic Near East, in particular that found on seals and sealings, objects often associated with information storage and administration. It considers the connection between those images and a broader Neolithic cosmology and, finally, the ways that both changed as cities replaced villages. The evidence is a set of imagery carved on small, portable objects such as palettes and seals, as well as their impressions on clay. By and large, seals have been studied as administrative and economic tools, part of a developing system of record-keeping in the millennia preceding the first writing. Their imagery, however, reveals elements of a basic cosmology, suggesting a religious context and meaning that precedes evidence of their use in administrative contexts. I posit that a) there are recurring motifs in the visual culture of the Neolithic Near East; and b) the subject matter of these motifs relates to religious beliefs and practices. I argue that to fully understand early seal use, we must proceed historically rather than ahistorically, first considering the primary association between these objects and cosmological concerns, and then broaden interpretations of later seal use, archive systems and ultimately writing, to consider how the content or meaning of the glyptic imagery may relate to those contexts.

The chaîne opératoire (CO) approach is a well-established method for the analysis of tool creation, use and discard, and associated cognitive processes. Its effectiveness in respect of cognition, however, is occasionally challenged. We briefly review key critiques of its epistemological and methodological limitations and consider alternative options. We suggest a new epistemological position and methodology which can link CO with alternative cognitive models and with the true complexity inherent in the stone tool archaeological record. Perception-action and embodied cognition theory are the proposed foundations of a new epistemology that allows us to reject the concept of thought processes underlying tool-making sequences as static entities selected from memory. Instead, they are described as arising, changing and flowing with and through bodily activity, or as the products of constant interaction between body, mind and environment. They are better understood as ongoing processes of situated task-structuring rather than as objectified concepts or symbols. The new methodology is designed to analyse individual tool-making processes rather than their products. We use a pilot study to explore how it can highlight variations in the gestural processes that structure different technologies and thus indicate potential differences in the associated cognitive strategies of the various tool-makers concerned.

This article addresses the relationship between southern African San myth and rock art. Three nineteenth-century | Xam San narratives, recorded verbatim, are shown to contain specifiable entities of meaning, here dubbed ‘nuggets’, that are easily misunderstood or missed entirely. Each performance of a myth developed or abbreviated the significances of these ‘nuggets’ as the narrator tailored the story to suit the social, political and economic circumstances of the moment. Similarly, San rock art contains painted ‘nuggets’ that, for the San, situated the panels in one way or another at the interface between existential realms. Each in its own way, certain tales and images both played a social role by emphasizing the functions of ritual specialists who were believed to move between realms as they healed the community of physical, economic and social ills, especially tension between affines.

Fragments of possible fired clay found at Boncuklu Höyük, central Turkey, appear to derive from rudimentary vessels, despite the later ninth- and early eighth-millennium cal. bc and thus ‘Aceramic’ dates for the site. This paper will examine the evidence for such fired clay vessels at Boncuklu and consider their implications as examples of some of the earliest pottery in Anatolia. The discussion will examine contextual evidence for the role of these fragments and consider their relative rarity at the site and the implications for the marked widespread adoption of pottery in southwest Asia c. 7000–6700 cal. bc.

This article examines how personhood was shaped in the routine dispositional relations of longhouse life among the Iroquoian societies of eastern North America. Drawing on scholarship that situates the emergence of culturally-specific modes of personhood within relational networks of people and things, I present evidence that over seven centuries, a deep resonance developed between the ‘polyvalence’ of Iroquoian domestic spaces and a broadly ‘fractal’ (sensu Fowler 2004) or ‘part-in-whole’ sense of personhood in Iroquoian societies. An ethnohistoric review of seventeenth-century Ontario Iroquoian concepts of personhood is followed by an archaeological analysis of the development of longhouses between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. I report the results of a kernel density estimation (KDE) analysis of the spatial distribution of post and pit features across longhouse living floors in a diachronic study of 45 hearth areas. The results indicate that everyday practices within the longhouse came to follow several characteristic patterns by the mid-twelfth century ad. These patterns served to define ‘polyvalent’ relationships in which resident persons and nuclear families were at once identifiable as distinct social atoms and as inextricable components of larger hypostatic wholes — most especially house and lineage. A fundamental coherence was thereby established between the embodied experience of domestic taskscapes and a mode of personhood in which any social whole was understood as a dynamic and partible alliance of elements.