This article addresses the nature of the evidence for symbolling behaviour among hominids living in the Near East during the Middle and Upper Pleistocene. Traditionally, Palaeolithic art and symbolling have been synonymous with the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe. The Berekhat Ram figurine, a piece of volcanic material from a Lower Palaeolithic site in Israel, described as purposely modified to produce human features, challenges the view of a late emergence of symbolic behaviour. The anthropogenic nature of these modifications, however, is controversial. We address this problem through an examination of volcanic material from the Berekhat Ram site and from other sources, and by experimentally reproducing the modifications observed on the figurine. We also analyze this material and the figurine itself through optical and SEM microscopy. Our conclusion is that this object was purposely modified by hominids.

With comments from Ofer Bar-Yosef, Angela E. Close, João Zilhão, Steven Mithen, Thomas Wynn, and Alexander Marshack followed by a reply from the authors.

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.

Explicitly symbolic behaviour is usually seen as the hallmark of the behavioural transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe. It is suggested here that this new symbolic component is reflected not only in art and personal ornamentation, but also in the design and form of stone tools, and perhaps also in features such as the organization of living structures. All these new features could be argued to reflect the emergence of typically Upper Palaeolithic ‘culture’ and technology. Whether these features can be correlated directly with the transition from archaic to modern skeletal forms remains more problematic; and whether the changes need reflect any significant shift in the neurological capacities for behaviour and cognition is equally controversial.

The dead, collectively or individually, are sometimes powerful forces in human society. At other times they fade into relative insignificance. How archaeologists recover such ideological changes has repercussions for their interpretation of social organization and social change. Interpretations of status, gender, and ranking from funerary deposits are to a large extent dependent on archaeologists' abilities to interpret initially the relationship that the living construct with the dead. This contextual analysis of the Danish Iron Age uses studies of landscape and topography, and contrasts in material culture to situate the changing placement of the dead in society. Their increasing incorporation into the world of the living in the pre-Roman Iron Age indicates a growing concern with lineage and individual status. Later on, within the hierarchical ordering of Roman Iron Age society, the dead retained their significance for the living but in certain regions this was expressed in terms of their communality rather than status differences.

This article examines a range of practices involving the deliberate fragmentation of human bodies and objects in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain. Focusing on evidence from settlements and mortuary sites, it is suggested that metaphorical links were drawn between people and things, and that productive processes such as potting and metallurgy provided potent metaphors for the construction of the human self. Building on these points, it is argued that current models which posit the rise of an ideology of the ‘individual’ during the Bronze Age may be inappropriate in this cultural context.

In the early days of anthropology, indigenous concepts of animating essences and the cross-cutting nature of the life-force, expressed in such terms as hau and mana, were front and centre in the ethnographic literature (e.g. Mauss 1954; 1975; Malinowski 1922; 1936; 1948). Branded as ‘mystical’, ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ for more than a generation, however, such potentially key conceptual sites of alterity have only recently begun to be revisited and recuperated within anthropology and in other fields such as material culture studies and cognitive sciences. The articles in this special issue of CAJ consider what archaeology might contribute to the general theoretical discussion on animism and alternative ontologies. As a set, they offer a diversity of perspectives on how the recognition of animism as a prevalent theme within contemporary indigenous worlds can affect archaeological analysis and interpretation. They also offer ideas about how attending to the significance of such concepts may provide new analytical purchase on alternative ontologies and ways of constructing, dissolving, or transforming traditional dichotomies that continue to powerfully shape our worlds.

In this article, I discuss the ways in which animals act as ontological subjects — as other-than-human persons and as agents in myth and ritual. First I outline how humans conceive of and behave with animals and their remains in indigenous cosmologies using ethnographic and ethnohistoric examples from the Arctic, Subarctic and Amazonia. I then explore the archaeological evidence for indigenous ontologies along the coasts of Chukotka and Alaska, arguing that prehistoric hunters interacted with animals as agential persons, engaging in social practices intended to facilitate hunting success and avoid offending prey. Two forms of ritual activities are discussed: the use of hunting amulets and the caching of animal bones and antlers. I conclude that focusing on shamanism in the study of hunter-gatherer belief obscures the roles of hunters and their wives. Their thoughts and actions established and maintained relationships with prey animals and may be more productively conceptualized as dynamic social behaviours embedded within the context of daily life than as privileged ritual acts.

A major focus of inter-disciplinary debate has been the need to bridge the Cartesian divide between people as active subjects and inert passive objects, to better reflect how things provoke and resist human actions through their ‘secondary agency’. Many Central Andean people express a deep concern about their relationship with places and things, which they communicate with through daily work and rituals involving ‘sympathetic magic’. A consideration of Andean animism emphasizes how agency is located in the social relationship people have with the material world and how material objects can have social identities.

Ancient cities as documented by archaeologists and historians have considerable relevance for a broader understanding of modern cities and general processes of urbanization. This article reviews three themes that illustrate such relevance: sprawl, squatter settlements and urban sustainability. Archaeology's potential for illuminating these and other topics, however, remains largely unrealized because we have failed to develop the concepts and methods required to analyse such processes in the past. The following aspects are examined for each of the three themes: the modern situation, the potential insights that archaeology could contribute, and what archaeologists would need to do to produce those insights. The author then discusses some of the benefits that would accrue from increased communication between archaeologists and other scholars of urbanism.

People dwell in a world of their own subjective making. For many hunters, engagement with the ‘natural’ world is a negotiated affair because animals, like people, possess spirits. A critical part of the negotiation process is mediation of the human–prey relationship by hunting magic. Torres Strait Islanders of NE Australia are skilled hunters of dugongs, a marine mammal whose capture entails a broad range of ritual practices. Following ethnographic expectations, excavation of bone mounds reveals ritual treatment of dugong bones, especially skulls, to increase hunting success. Extensive use of dugong bones in ritual sites has important implications for the extent to which ‘secular’ midden deposits are representative of Islander subsistence practices. Since dugong bone mounds provide archaeological insights into Islander spiritual relationships with dugongs, chronological changes in use of these sites inform us about historical developments in Islander ontology and their ritual orchestration of seascapes and spiritual connections to the sea.

Whether Neanderthals were capable of behaviours commonly held to be the exclusive preserve of modern humans — such as abstract thought, language, forward planning, art, reverence of the dead, complex technology, etc. — has remained a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies since their discovery more than a hundred years ago. A lack of quantitative data on Neanderthal symbolism and complex behaviour is a key obstacle to the resolution of this question, with temporal analyses usually confined to single regions or short time periods. Here we present an approach to the issue of symbolism and complex behaviours among Neanderthals that examines the frequency of key proxies for symbolic and complex behaviours through time, including burials, modified raw materials, use of pigments, use of composite technology and body modification. Our analysis demonstrates that the number and diversity of complex Neanderthal behaviours increases between 160,000 and 40,000 years ago. Whether this pattern derives from preservation factors, the evolution of cognitive and behavioural complexity, cumulative learning, or population size is discussed. We take the view that it is not the apparent sophistication of a single specific item, nor the presence or absence of particular types in the archaeological record that is important. Instead, we believe that it is the overall abundance of artefacts and features indicative of complex behaviours within the Neanderthal archaeological record as a whole that should provide the mark of Neanderthal capabilities and cultural evolutionary potential.

Australia was colonized by at least 40,000 bp and scientists agree that the continent was only ever occupied by anatomically and behaviourally modern humans. Australia thus offers an alternative early record for the archaeological expression of behavioural modernity. This review finds that the pattern of change in the Australian archaeological sequence bears remarkable similarity to the pattern from the Lower to Upper Palaeolithic in the Old World, a finding that is inconsistent with the ‘symbolic revolution’ model of the origin of modern behaviour. This highlights the need for archaeologists to rethink the implications of the various criteria and scales of analysis used to identify modern human behaviour.

This article, which is based on the fourteenth McDonald Lecture, considers two tensions in contemporary archaeology. One is between interpretations of specific structures, monuments and deposits as the result of either ‘ritual’ or ‘practical’ activities in the past, and the other is between an archaeology that focuses on subsistence and adaptation and one that emphasizes cognition, meaning, and agency. It suggests that these tensions arise from an inadequate conception of ritual itself. Drawing on recent studies of ritualization, it suggests that it might be more helpful to consider how aspects of domestic life took on special qualities in later prehistoric Europe. The discussion is based mainly on Neolithic enclosures and other monuments, Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement sites and the Viereckschanzen of central Europe. It may have implications for field archaeology as well as social archaeology, and also for those who study the formation of the archaeological record.

In this article I employ the example of the ‘Blind Man's stick’ (BMS) in order to redraw the traditional boundaries that separate brains, bodies and things. It is argued that the functional anatomy of the human brain is a dynamic bio-cultural construct subject to continuous ontogenetic and phylogenetic remodelling by behaviourally important and socially embedded experiences. These experiences are mediated and sometimes constituted by the use of material objects and artefacts (like the stick) which for that reason should be seen as continuous and active parts of the human cognitive architecture. Based on the above premises I use the example of the Blombos shell beads in order to explore the role of early body decoration in the emergence of human self awareness.

This article discusses social interaction in the Epipalaeolithic of southwest Asia. Discussions of contact, social relationships and social organization have primarily focused on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and are often considered to represent typical hallmarks of emergent farming societies. The hunter-gatherers of the final Pleistocene, in particular those of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic, have more rarely been the focus of such discussions. In this article we consider evidence for interaction from the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan, to question the uniqueness of the Neolithic evidence for interaction. We argue that interaction between differently-constituted groups can be traced within the Early Epipalaeolithic of the southern Levant, suggesting that it is of far greater antiquity than previously considered.

Since the mid-1980s, debates between competing schools of archaeological interpretation have become more theoretical and abstruse, moving away from confrontations over specific methods of analyzing our data. This article reopens arguments over one of the more controversial propositions of the New Archaeology - Saxe's claim that the emergence of formal cemeteries corresponds to the appearance of agnatic lineages monopolizing vital resources through inheritance. The hypothesis is examined in three ways: through a generalized ethnological model; through specific ethnographic data from Taiwan and Kenya; and through a historical comparison of Athens from 500 to 100 BC and Rome from 200 BC to AD 200. It is argued that all three methods lead to a similar conclusion, that many societies do indeed talk about the dead in the way the Saxe/Goldstein hypothesis maintains, but that in any specific instance the cemetery/property message may well be subverted by other arguments which the buriers are making.

Despite great variability in archaeological and ethnographic material culture across North America, a handful of objects are ubiquitous in assemblages of different ages and geographies. These index objects are clues to ontological principles, such as animacy, that guide the interactions between Native Americans and the material world. The impact of relational ontologies on the formation of heterogeneous archaeological assemblages may be evaluated through analyses of index objects and contextual associations. To this effect, this article presents the outline of an assemblage-based relational taxonomy, where spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions are combined with object biographies, interactive roles, and social relations.

Extremely lavish funeral feasts are common and expensive in many village and chiefdom societies. Anthropologists and politicians often explain such apparently economically irrational expenditures in terms of culture values or traditions. However, viewed from the broader perspective of other types of promotional feasts in transegalitarian or more complex societies (including marriages and house feasts), overtly competitive funeral feasts are used to advertise the success of the surviving family and kin groups. This socioeconomic promotion is important for attracting powerful/successful/wealthy families as affines and allies. Such allies are critical for defending family and individual self-interests in village political and economic struggles that are endemic. Funerals are especially apt contexts for these displays and political manoeuvres.

Recent research in historical linguistics suggests that groups or ‘families’ of languages may be classed together into larger language units or ‘macrofamilies’, for which some community of origin has been argued. The Afro-Asiatic macrofamily, for instance, which includes the Semitic and Berber languages as well as Ancient Egyptian and many languages of North and East Africa, is widely accepted among linguists. More controversial is the Nostratic macrofamily (including the Indo-European, the Altaic, the Uralic languages, etc.). The implications for prehistoric archaeology of the existence of such large linguistic units is examined. It is suggested that processes of agricultural dispersal may account for the widespread distribution of some of these macrofamilies.

Most pristine states formed in the context of competing chiefdoms, when one of the latter succeeded in incorporating its rivals into a larger polity. Some of the processes evident during state formation include chiefly cycling, biased transmission, territorial expansion, and the gaining of competitive advantage. In some archaeological circles, however, it has become fashionable to reject ecological, demographic, and technological processes, and seek agent-based or ideological explanations for state formation. This essay, delivered as the tenth McDonald Lecture, examines five agents who modified ideologies and created states from chiefdoms. It concludes that process and agency are complementary, rather than antithetical, perspectives; thus the latter is unlikely to make the former obsolete.