For more than a hundred years the three colossal limestone figures from Coptos have challenged anyone wishing to write on the development of culture and society in early Egypt. Beginning from a fuller documentation of the three, a reconstruction of their original context is proposed, namely, an array of standing stones, a type of sacred structure of which a growing number of examples are known in the region. A study of the signs carved on their sides answers recent speculations that they record the names of early kings. Both the colossi and the system of symbols to which the signs belong represent a culture which, in consequence of a thoroughgoing ancient process of redefinition, was subsequently overlaid by the significantly different culture of Pharaonic Egypt.

This paper examines how monuments with ‘local’ idiosyncrasies are key in processes of place-making and how, through persistence, such places can engage in supra-local and even ‘global’ dynamics. Departing from a detailed revision of its context, materiality and iconography, we show how a remarkable Iberian ‘warrior’ stela brings together the geo-strategic potential of a unique site, located literally between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds, the century-long dialogue between shared and local identities and the power of connectivity of inexorable global processes. Previous approaches to Iberian late prehistoric stelae have had problems in developing bottom-up, theoretically informed and empirically sound approaches to their simultaneously local and supra-local character. The remarkable site of Almargen provides the opportunity to explore this issue. Located in Lands of Antequera (Málaga), a region with a strong tradition of landscape-making through monuments going back to the Late Neolithic, the Almargen ‘warrior’ stela serves us to explore the notion of ‘glocalization’, which embodies persistent local engagements with material culture, sites and landscapes on the one hand, and their connections with wider regional and even ‘global’ worlds on the other.

This paper addresses the motivations for producing the rare object stencils found in the rock art of western Arnhem Land. We present evidence for 84 stencils recorded as part of the Mirarr Gunwarddebim project in western Arnhem Land, northern Australia. Ranging from boomerangs to dilly bags, armlets and spearthrowers, this assemblage suggests something other than a common or ongoing culture practice of stencilling objects used in everyday life. Instead, we suggest that these stencils represent an entirely different function in rock art through a process of memorialization that was rare, opportunistic and highly selective.

The materiality of ritual performance is a growing focus for archaeologists. In Europe, collective ritual performance is expected to be highly structured and to leave behind a loud archaeological signature. In Australia and Papua New Guinea, ritual is highly structured; however, material signatures for performance are not always apparent, with ritual frequently bound up in the surrounding natural and cultural landscape. One way of assessing long-term ritual in this context is by using archaeology to historicize ethno-historical and ethnographic accounts. Examples of this in the Torres Strait region, islands between Papua New Guinea and mainland Australia, suggest that ritual activities were materially inscribed at kod sites (ceremonial men's meeting places) through distribution of clan fireplaces, mounds of stone/bone and shell. This paper examines the structure of Torres Strait ritual for a site ethnographically reputed to be the ancestral kod of the Mabuyag Islanders. Intra-site partitioning of ritual performance is interpreted using ethnography, rock art and the divergent distribution of surface and sub-surface materials (including microscopic analysis of dugong bone and lithic material) across the site. Finally, it discusses the materiality of ritual at a boundary zone between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and the extent to which archaeology provides evidence for Islander negotiation through ceremony of external incursions.

This paper proposes a multi-disciplinary approach which can be used to identify captives and the enslaved of Iron Age Britain (seventh century bc–ad first century). It uses a ‘poetics of violence’ perspective which recognizes that violence and warfare are created and enacted through social relations, and encompasses violence for which there is often no archaeological trace. Roman primary sources, bog-bodies and other archaeological evidence from Iron Age Britain and Europe suggest that people in these states of ‘social death’ were used to acquire material goods, employed in the agricultural economy, and their deaths played an important role in episodes of ritual violence. Drawing on research from North America, a series of funerary, isotope, archaeothantology and osteological variables have been identified for this period, and when integrated into an osteobiography, allows for the re-interpretation of many burials and structured deposits encountered in Iron Age settlements and hillforts.

Archaeology in Sudan and Nubia has been greatly impacted by modern colonialism in northeast Africa. In theory and practice, the discipline's history in the region includes interpretations of past realities that worked as intellectual bases for colonization. From a postcolonial standpoint, Sudan and Nubia offer us an opportunity to investigate complexity in the past beyond oversimplifying colonial narratives entangled with the practice of modern archaeology in the region. However, more complex, postcolonial interpretations of the ancient past have played only a small part in ‘decolonizing’ initiatives aiming to reframe archaeological practice and heritage in Sudan and Nubia today. In this paper, I discuss the different trajectories of postcolonial and decolonial theory in archaeology, focusing on Sudan and Nubia (roughly the region south of Egypt from Aswan and north of Sudan up to Khartoum). I will argue that bridging postcolonial and decolonial theory through what I will refer to as ‘narratives of reparation’ can offer us ways to address both conceptual problems underlying theory and practice and avenues for an all-encompassing decolonization of the field.

André Leroi-Gourhan's work is usually considered a paradigmatic example of the application of structuralist ideas to the study of Palaeolithic art. The association between Leroi-Gourhan and structuralism is, however, problematic. Leroi-Gourhan explicitly distinguished his approach from that of Lévi-Strauss. Furthermore, he developed an explanatory model for the analysis of cave and portable art based on a number of postulates that were not necessarily connected to structuralism. We examine Leroi-Gourhan's understanding of Palaeolithic art in order to determine the influence of structuralism upon his work. This examination will help us to consider some alternative perspectives on the so-called structural analysis of Palaeolithic art. Moreover, Leroi-Gourhan's case will allow us to reflect on how archaeologists appropriate theory from other disciplines and how intellectual production in archaeology works.

This essay argues for the diversity and promise of posthuman approaches in archaeology by dispelling blanket critiques, by differentiating between distinct lines of post-anthropocentric thought and by pointing to parallels between Posthumanism and collaborative Indigenous archaeologies. It begins by arguing that symmetrical archaeology is but one part of the diverse body of thought labelled ‘posthuman’. Next, it explores broader posthuman engagements with political issues relevant for collaborative Indigenous archaeologies, particularly concerns regarding under-represented groups in the field. Finally, it identifies flat ontologies as key components of posthuman approaches, clarifying what this term means for different lines of post-anthropocentric thought and briefly considering how the concept of flatness compares with Indigenous metaphysics.

Prestigious burials furnished with tools used in metalworking appear from the Eneolithic to the Early Middle Ages. The social status of the deceased has become a subject of a long-running discussion, one that typically ends with a statement on the prominent standing of individuals mastering the processing of metal in ancient societies. This notion is inspired by the ideas of V.G. Childe, and modern attempts to connect the Marxist–Leninist approach with the completely opposing phenomenologist approach result in a vicious circle. Obvious burials of rulers and children with forging tools document that an interpretation seeking highly respected craftsmen in ‘smiths’ burials' is flawed. The author sees the origin of the habit of equipping burials with forging tools in ritual metallurgy: the attributes of buried leaders who, through the use of forging tools, secured the prosperity of their community during rituals, became themselves symbols of elite standing. As in the case of burial furnishings, the performance of ritual metallurgy also depended on the organization of society, thus resulting in differences in the chrono-geographical distribution of burials with forging tools: in the period in which burials furnished with forging tools decline in the Mediterranean, their number peaks in central Europe; their occurrence ends in Viking Age Scandinavia.

In Ireland the supernatural sí (loosely translated as ‘fairies’) were strongly associated with thousands of archaeological monuments and natural places in the landscape, and many prehistoric artefacts were regarded as material culture of the sí. Such artefacts assumed an important role in popular religious practices, folk medicine and magic, most frequently to invoke cures for farm animals, but also to protect the homestead. Though little discussed in archaeological literature, the interpretation of prehistoric artefacts as potent objects from the supernatural world, and their ability actively to influence the well-being of livestock and the household, illustrates the rich and complex lives many archaeological artefacts assumed several thousand years after their initial manufacture, use and discard. The folk use of such artefacts as active agencies contrasts with the contemporaneous antiquarian collection and display of archaeological material as relics of ancient cultures.

The Neolithic tombs of northern Europe have often been presented as built in the image of the hous e of the dead. We wish to discuss here the different terms of this proposition in the light of recent discoveries concerning the domestic habitat in western France, whence we draw most of the architectural examples — both funerary and domestic.

The Chimú state of northern coastal Peru (ad 900–1480) developed massive irrigation-based agricultural systems supplied by intricate networks of canals drawing water from river sources in coastal valleys under their political control. Further intervalley canal systems, some up to 50 miles in length, were constructed to shunt water between river valleys to augment intravalley supplies. A high degree of civil engineering skill was necessary to construct and maintain such complex systems; knowledge of surveying and of open channel flow hydraulics was paramount. Some of the technology used by the Chimú has been investigated: surveying instruments and calculating tools have been unearthed and analyzed to provide some understanding of the technical base used for canal design. Details of the hydraulics knowledge-base have been extracted from computer simulation of the functioning of ancient Chimú canal designs. This article assembles known pieces of information related to Chimú civil engineering practice and attempts to provide a plausible methodology that could have been implemented by the Chimú to survey the precise canal bed slopes necessary for proper hydraulic functioning of large canal systems through rugged Andean foothill and mountain areas.

This article seeks to gain an understanding of distinctive changes in certain artefacts produced in Corinth in the late eighth and seventh centuries BC. The focus is the development of figurative imagery on miniature ceramic vessels (many of them perfume jars) which travelled from Corinth particularly to sanctuaries and cemeteries in the wider Greek world. Connections, conceptual and material, are traced through the manufacture and iconography of some 2000 pots, through changing lifestyles, with juxtapositions of contemporary poetry from other parts of the Greek world. Aspects of embodiment are foregrounded in a discussion of stylization and drawing, the character of monstrosity (appearing in ceramic decoration), experiences of risk in battle, discipline and control. Techniques of the self (leading through the floral to wider lifestyles) also feature in this context, together with perfume, and the consumption or deposition of the pots in circumstances of contact with death and divinity. The argument is made that the articulation of an ideological field lay at the core of the changes of the early city states such as Corinth. The article is offered as a contribution to a contextual and interpretive archaeology. It attempts to develop concepts for dealing with power relations in an understanding of material culture production which foregrounds human agency and embodied experience.

This article evaluates defensive works at the ancient hilltop centre of Yayno, Pomabamba, north highlands, Peru. Survey, mapping and sampling excavations show that its primaryoccupation dates to cal. AD 400–800, by groups of the Recuay tradition. At the centre of a network articulating small nearby farming villages, Yayno features an impressive series of natural and built defensive strategies. These worked in concert to protect the community from outsiders and keep internal groups physically segregated. The fortifications are discussed in relation to local political organization and a martial aesthetic in northern Peru during the period. Recuay elite identity and monumentalism arose out of local corporate traditions of hilltop dwelling and defence. Although such traditions are now largely absent in contemporary patterns of settlement, an archaeology of warfare at Yayno has repercussions for local understandings of the past.

In this paper we discuss the universal selection of exceptional materials for tool making in prehistory. The interpretation suggested in the literature for these non-standard materials is usually limited to a general statement, considering possible aesthetic values or a general, mostly unexplained, symbolic meaning. We discuss the implications of viewing these materials as active agents and living vital beings in Palaeolithic archaeology as attested in indigenous hunter-gatherer communities all around the world. We suggest that the use of specific materials in the Palaeolithic was meaningful, and beyond its possible ‘symbolic’ meaning, it reflects deep familiarity and complex relations of early humans with the world surrounding them—humans and other-than-human persons (animals, plants, water and stones)—on which they were dependent. We discuss the perception of tools and the materials from which they are made as reflecting relationships, respectful behaviour and functionality from an ontological point of view. In this spirit, we suggest re-viewing materials as reflecting social, cosmological and ontological world-views of Palaeolithic humans, and looking beyond their economic, functional aspects, as did, perhaps, our ancestors themselves.

The origin of record keeping is a key question in the development of social complexity and specialized economies, representing the first step towards the emergence of written communication. Yet the precursors of the world's earliest writing and its initial stages of development remain little understood. Small, geometric clay objects (‘tokens’) appear in the tenth millennium cal. bc, the start of the Neolithic in West Asia, prevailing into the first millennium. It is largely assumed that from their inception clay objects played a crucial role in record keeping, directly evolving into the world's earliest known writing. Utilizing new and previously unpublished Neolithic data comprising almost individually studied 3000 objects, accompanied by information from 56 further Neolithic sites, this article investigates the meaning of Neolithic ‘tokens’. Analysis proves the basis of their predominant interpretation to be incorrect; clay objects appear earlier than previously recognized and are not a necessary component of Neolithic agro-pastoral villages. ‘Tokens’ were multi-functional artefacts; even within a single site clay objects performed multiple roles. Though likely used in simple counting activities, this was not limited to the accounting of agricultural produce. Nor was counting the sole function of clay objects in the Neolithic. Clay objects were not created to administer agricultural produce and there is no evidence to suggest that in the Neolithic they formed part of a unified symbolic system.

Drawing on recent theories of materiality and non-human agency, this article examines the aftermath of a compelling episode in American history, the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. In particular, I focus on certain ‘extensions’ of the massacre victims, as they encounter and become entangled with other material traces and embodied remembrances over the course of the twentieth century. An initial illustration of this process is drawn from the life history of an Arkansas native whose movements to and from his homeland have entangled him in the vast assemblage brought together by the events at Mountain Meadows. I then turn to the rupture in this assemblage that was triggered in 1999 by the exposure of human bones at the massacre site. Materiality theory highlights the ways in which some objects (or their parts) persist and remain inalienable, while others circulate with varying degrees of freedom. Patterns of persistence and circulation are analysed here by focusing on two kinds of objects with intimate ties to the massacre victims: the bodies of the 17 surviving children, and six buttons made of glass and metal.

The art of Neolithic Britain and Ireland consists of a variety of curvilinear and geometric motifs pecked into stone (in open-air rock art or passage tombs) or carved into portable artefacts of chalk, stone or antler. Because of its abstract nature the art has proved problematic for archaeologists. Initially archaeologists assumed the art was representational; now most scholars have abandoned this view, and simply approach the art stylistically. Here I argue that stylistic analysis is insufficient to understand this art: instead the process of making provides a fuller understanding of this art. It is argued that the practice of assemblage is a key aspect of the process of making.

This paper utilizes Material Engagement Theory (MET), which examines material culture as a dynamic and integral component of human cognitive systems, in order to explore the relationship between Cycladic marble sculpting and the complex social organization evinced at the sites of Dhaskalio and Kavos on the island of Keros. The article shows how the development of Cycladic sculpting in conjunction with transforming settlement patterns suggests that the figurines emerged as part of a kinshipping dynamic. In this context, evidence from the cognitive sciences reveals how Cycladic figurines were profound attention-capturing technologies which shaped the development of intersubjectivity and collective activity. Cycladic marble provided a medium through which a semiotics of value could be generated, circulated and manipulated across the archipelago. The article argues that marble artefacts formed part of a distributed cognitive system which enabled the regional organization of long-range voyaging regimes centred on Dhaskalio-Kavos. The role of Cycladic sculpture in mediating maritime social interactions is clarified by examining the dynamics of social cognition and the organizational burdens of long-range voyaging culture. The relationship between marble, social interaction and longboat voyaging provides a strong explanation for the development and transformation of Keros as well as for broader chronological developments in the region. Cycladic sculpting traditions mediated the shifting burdens upon social cognition during the Early Bronze Age, facilitating the novel forms of social organization in the central Cyclades as a response to both the pressures and the opportunities of the Aegean world. Keros provides an exemplary case study of material culture's role in extending the boundaries of social cognition in ways that enable social complexity to emerge at new scales.