The Blackfoot bison hunters of the North American Plains are widely known for their artfully painted lodges commonly known as ‘tipis’. Traditionally, tipi designs were not for everyone; rather, they were received individually from the spirit world or ceremonially transferred from one person to another under strict covenants. Painted tipis advertised the spiritual and social stature of their owners and were intricately woven in the ontological fabric of the group. This article explores the role of the painted tipi in individual and social life among the Blackfoot to highlight how art can be used to construct social places, to accumulate material and ritual wealth and, ultimately, to make society.

In the search for cognition in the mute record of archaeology the record of ancient thought transmitted to us by early written texts is an obvious but underexploited resource. An examination of the classification of stones in Mesopotamia gives a rare opportunity to match textual information with the archaeological record, and offers some insights into the organization of thought and classification of knowledge by one of the first literate societies.A group of unshaped stones in the corner of a grave under the floor of a Sumerian dwelling attests to an awareness of natural properties as distinct from functions, whether or not these concepts were already formulated in words. The group of various stones also hints at the concept of a class, the first stirring of a mindset which percolates through Plato and Aristotle to Linnaeus. Already in c. 2000 BC the essential properties of some of these stones were conceptualized and described in a ‘literary’ composition, and the concept of a stable set of properties is linked to traditions relating to the proper source of a stone. Later still, maybe around 1000 BC, the Mesopotamian scribes created a lapidary or ‘Handbook of Stones’ which provides an ordered key to stones in respect of their appearance. Then, or later, the description of their appearance was supplemented by details in which their natural or physical properties were distinguished, along with magical properties some of which were probably transmitted to the Hellenistic world.

Recent investigations at the Maya centre of Nakum (in Guatemala) enabled the study of the evolution of an interesting complex of buildings that started as the so-called E-Group, built during the Preclassic period (c. 600–300 bc). It was used for solar observations and rituals commemorating agricultural and calendrical cycles. During the Classic period (ad 250–800), the major building of the complex (Structure X) was converted into a large pyramidal temple where several burials, including at least one royal tomb, were placed. We were also able to document evidence of mortuary cults conducted by the Maya in the temple building situated above the burials. The architectural conversion documented in Structure X may reflect important religious and social changes: a transformation from the place where the Sun was observed and worshipped to the place where deceased and deified kings were apotheosized as the Sun Deity during the Classic. Thus the Maya transformed Structure X into one of the most sacred loci at Nakum by imbuing it with a complex solar and underworld symbolism and associating it with the cult of deified ancestors.

The principal factors influencing the location of the Old Kingdom pyramids in Egypt are reconsidered. The decisive factors influencing their distribution over an area of c. eighty kilometres were essentially of economic, geomorphologic, socio-political and unavoidably also of religious nature. Primary importance is to be attributed to the existence of the Old Kingdom capital of Egypt, Memphis, which was a central place with regard to the Old Kingdom pyramid fields. Its economic potential and primacy in the largely redistribution-driven state economy sustained construction of the vast majority of the pyramid complexes in its vicinity. The location of the remaining number of the Old Kingdom pyramids, including many of the largest ever built, is explained using primarily archaeological evidence. It is claimed that the major factors influencing their location lie in the sphere of general trends governing ancient Egyptian society of the period.

Present in the Trans-Pecos rock art of west Texas are many motifs intelligible within hunter-gatherer ontological frameworks. These motifs—including human figures missing heads and limbs, figures with disproportionately large eyes, polymelia and pilo-erection—are concerned with somatic transformations and distortions experienced in altered states of consciousness. Ethnographic analogies also demonstrate that other Trans-Pecos features—smearing, rubbing and chipping of pigment and incorporation of natural inequalities of the rock surfaces into images—are evidence of kinetic experiences or embodied processes, including the important interaction with the ‘veil’ that separates one tier of the cosmos from others. By exploring the related concepts of embodiment, somatic transformation and process within non-Western ontologies, I offer a unified but multi-component explanation for the meanings and motivations behind several Trans-Pecos rock-art motifs. I also address the consumption of rock art in west Texas—how it was viewed and used by the original artists and subsequent viewers to shape, maintain and challenge ideologies and identities.

Alligator Mound is an animal effigy mound in central Ohio, USA. Since Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis first recorded and mapped it in 1848, many have speculated regarding its age and meaning, but with remarkably little systematic archaeological investigation. Many scholars have assumed the Hopewell culture (c. 100 BC-AD 400) built the mound, based principally on its proximity to the Newark Earthworks. The Hopewell culture, however, is not known to have built other effigy mounds. Limited excavations in 1999 revealed details of mound stratigraphy and recovered charcoal embedded in mound fill near the base of the mound. This charcoal yielded radiocarbon dates that average between AD 1170 and 1270, suggesting that the Late Prehistoric Fort Ancient culture (c. AD 1000-1550) made the mound. This result coincides with dates obtained for Serpent Mound in southern Ohio and suggests that the construction of effigy mounds in eastern North America was restricted to the Late Woodland and Late Prehistoric traditions. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogies suggest that the so-called 'Alligator' might actually represent the Underwater Panther and have served as a shrine for invoking the aid of supernatural powers.

The majority of large-scale enclosure walls constructed in Egypt in the second millennium bc were built around temples rather than towns. These walls were high and massive, sometimes with multiple enceintes, while details such as buttresses and crenellations appear to have related the design to contemporary defensive architecture. A libation basin from Memphis demonstrates clearly that a temple could be viewed as equivalent to a fortress by local inhabitants while the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu was closely modelled on contemporary fortress construction. These enclosure walls often represent a very significant investment of resources but are difficult to explain as defensive. Unlike town walls, temple enclosures were not optional extras but were an essential part of the architecture of the shrine.

One of the strengths of the archaeological discipline is our ability to examine social transformations over the course of centuries or millennia. However, we rarely think about the ways in which temporal scale affects our interpretations of these processes. Transformative social changes look different when seen from the perspective of the longue durée, a human lifespan, or a single day. Although they clearly result from human actions, long-term, major social changes cannot be understood simply as additive concatenations of short-term shifts.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that complex structures in the natural and cultural worlds emerge from two types of design. Bottom-up design involves the rote action of a simple algorithm in an environment constrained by physical laws. Top-down design involves deliberation and planning, and is unique to modern humans. Identifying the emergence of top-down design in the hominin lineage is an important research challenge, and the archaeological record of stone technology is our best evidence for it. A current view is that artefact types and flaking methods increased in complexity from 3.3 to c. 0.3 million years ago, reflecting improving capacities at spatial cognition and working memory, culminating in top-down design perhaps as early as 1.75 million years ago. Recent experimental work, however, has shown that a simple ‘remove flake’ algorithm constrained by the laws of fracture mechanics—a form of bottom-up design—can produce stone tool attributes thought to be evidence of top-down design. Here, these models are reviewed and critiqued in light of the new experimental evidence. A revised working memory-based model, focusing on the recursive aspects of stone flaking, is proposed.

This article takes a critical look at claims that Landscape Phenomenology owes an ancestral debt to the work of early antiquarians; a belief that is in danger of becoming an orthodoxy through casual repetition. Through an exploration of the inherent tensions that arise when attempts are made to link pioneering empiricists (who in many senses embodied the Baconian experimental science of the seventeenth century) and Landscape Phenomenology (that positions itself in direct opposition to this enlightenment project) it is argued that rather than antiquarian practices pre-empting or anticipating those of Landscape Phenomenology, the nagging sense that the two are in some way connected derives from their shared reliance upon practices that are best described as chorographic.

The significance to the modern world of Mesopotamian celestial divination and astronomy cannot be overstated. The names and the ‘ominous’ values assigned to the heavenly bodies by the Mesopotamians underlie Western astrology, and have also influenced Indian astrology. Many of the key features in the astronomy of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, which later passed into the astronomy of the medieval world, were borrowed from the astronomers of Babylon and Uruk. The zodiac, the Metonic cycle, horoscopy, and a variety of astrological techniques are all first attested in Mesopotamia. The same goes for units, notably those divisions of space and time which are now used throughout the world (such as 60 minutes in an hour and 360° in a circle) which can be traced back to cuneiform antecedents.

The development of social hierarchy during the European Late Neolithic and Bronze Age is often taken for granted in the literature. The Bell Beaker culture has been given a primary role in this picture as it would correspond to the large-scale diffusion of prestige goods and associated individualistic values. On the basis of the French Midi sequence, this article seeks to demonstrate that the prestige model rests upon a simplistic and abstract perception of the data. Rather than the climax of social competition, the Bell Beaker culture marks the building of new fluid social networks which allowed better circulation of knowledge and people.

In southwest Asia, the emphasis on architecture and burial ritual, which was instrumental in the construction of place-bound identities during the Early Neolithic (c. 10,000–7000 cal. bc), shifted toward an emphasis on miniature portable objects, such as figurines, stamps and ceramics, during the Later Neolithic (c. 7000–5000 cal. bc). Through a focus on stamps, this article argues that the appearance and proliferation of image-bearing portable objects is related to a new understanding of identities around emergent concepts of ‘house’ and ‘community’, which reordered the terms of social affiliation as well as difference and hierarchy at various scales. In terms of an iconographical approach, stamp imagery shows some affinities with the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic themes of the Early Neolithic; however, the majority of the Later Neolithic stamp imagery is composed of highly abstract types that cannot immediately be associated with the themes of the Early Neolithic. A close examination would indicate that these abstract types were also reproduced by manipulating ancestral imagery. It would also appear that certain types of images were employed on certain types of objects, such as ceramics and figurines, in increasingly structured ways. Arguably, these seemingly different object classes are an outcome of a seamless historical discourse of raw materials, images and forms, continuously shifting the conceptualization of self and society. It is in this context that stamps may be treated as figurines of a highly abstract, highly crafted and highly standardized nature. While the clay figurines appropriated social identities in the domestic sphere, stamps and ceramics were instrumental in linking multiple scales of identity formation, from personal to communal. Reconsidering the material shift from the Early to Late Neolithic, I suggest that the spreading regulation of appropriating body and food was central in the construction of a convergent politics of reproduction around the concepts of ‘house’.

A San rock-art site in northeastern South Africa includes several intriguing features, including rubbed patches of pigment and a red line painted on top of a quartz vein. This article interrogates the relationships between hunter-gatherer beliefs, materiality and rock paintings, and suggests that San painters and viewers engaged with the unique Mpumalangan site for specific ritualistic purposes.

Outcrops of metallic mineralization were potentially prominent locations in past landscapes, the characteristics of their constituent minerals granting them distinctive appearances and properties. To date, most treatments have cast humans as exploiters whose prime motivation for engagement with the mineral world was the acquisition of metals. This article examines new evidence for Early Bronze Age activity at Roman Lode, a predominantly iron-rich ore deposit on Exmoor in southwest Britain. In addition to assessing whether this represents metal exploitation, other interpretive avenues are explored including the potential role of the site as a provider of other resources such as pigments and quartz and as an element in a wider conceptual and physical landscape. A layered approach to the interpretation of such sites is advocated. Only by combining a cognitive interpretation with materialist perspectives will we arrive at a more insightful understanding of the past significance of minerals, mining and landscape.

Whereas in Europe the transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic and the replacement of Neanderthal by anatomically modern humans appear to be synchronous events, in Africa this is not the case. Neanderthals as such were not present in Africa, and if the ‘Out of Africa’ model is correct, the ancestors of anatomically modern humans must have made their appearance in a Middle Stone Age context before 100,000 years ago. Subsequently, it seems that they coexisted with Neanderthals for up to 70,000 years in the Near East. If a direct biological correlation can be ruled out, the question arises: what was the impetus for an Upper Palaeolithic ‘revolution’ and why should it have taken place at all?

In this paper, we examine a Terminal Formative-period (150 bc–ad 250) bundled offering from the site of Cerro de la Virgen, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The offering was emplaced below a prominent public building in the site's ceremonial centre and contained five stone objects, including a rain deity mask, a fragment of a second mask, a figurine of a deceased ancestor and two miniature table altars, as well as nine small ceramic vessels. Considered together as a ‘sacred bundle’, the stone objects collectively reference agricultural fertility, rulership and ancestor veneration, which we interpret to be a metaphorical invocation of a fundamental tenet of prehispanic Mesoamerican religious belief—the sacred covenant. The offering also played an active part in founding the community of Cerro de la Virgen, connecting its residents with the divine, the ancestors and the outside world and constituting differences in status among its members.

This article focuses on the early coinage of the Akhaian cities of South Italy — Sybaris, Kroton, Metapontion, Kaulonia, Poseidonia — against the backdrop of colonization. Minting an early and distinctive series of coins, these centres were issuing coinage well before their ‘mother-cities’, a phenomenon that has never been fully appreciated. With its origins in a colonial context, the Akhaian coinage of Magna Graecia not only differs from that of the early coin-minting states of the Greek mainland, it offers a case study that challenges long-held assumptions and potentially contributes to a better understanding of the origins of coinage. It does so by suggesting that coinage is much more than a symbol of authority and represents considerably more than just an abstract notion of sovereignty or hegemony. The images or emblems that the Akhaians of South Italy chose for their coins are those current in the contemporary cultural landscape of the historic Akhaians, but at the same time actively recall the world of the heroic Akhaians of the Bronze Age by referring to prehistoric measures of value. More than his, the vicissitudes of colonial and indigenous history in parts of South Italy in the Archaic period were not merely reflected in coinage, the coins themselves were central to the processes of transformation. By boldly minting — constructing — their identity on coinage, the Akhaians of South Italy chose money in order to create relations of dominance and to produce social orders that had not existed before.