To remain in place in the immediate aftermath of the ninth-century Maya collapse, Maya groups employed various resilient strategies. In the absence of divine rulers, groups needed to renegotiate their forms of political authority and to reconsider the legitimizing role of religious institutions. This kind of negotiation happened first at the local level, where individual communities developed varied political and ideological solutions. At the community of Actuncan, located in the lower Mopan River valley of Belize, reorganization took place within the remains of a monumental urban centre built 1000 years before by the site's early rulers. I report on the changing configuration and use of Actuncan's urban landscape during the process of reorganization. These modifications included the construction of a new centre for political gatherings, the dismantling of old administrative buildings constructed by holy lords and the reuse of the site's oldest ritual space. These developments split the city into distinct civic and ritual zones, paralleling the adoption of a new shared rule divorced from cosmological underpinnings. This case study provides an example of how broader societal resilience relies on adaptation at the local level.

Serpent Mound, in northern Adams County, Ohio, USA, is one of the most iconic symbols of ancient America and yet there is no widely agreed upon date for the age of its original construction. Some archaeologists consider it to have been built by the Adena culture around 300 bc, while others contend it was built by the Fort Ancient culture around ad 1100. There have been three attempts to obtain radiometric ages for the effigy, but they have yielded inconclusive results. The iconography of the earthwork offers an alternative means of placing the mound in its cultural context. Serpent imagery is abundant in the Fort Ancient culture as well as in the more encompassing Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere. Pictographs from Picture Cave in Missouri include a serpent, a humanoid female and a vulvoid in close association. We interpret these elements, in the light of Siouan oral traditions, as First Woman and her consort the Great Serpent. The Picture Cave imagery dates to between ad 950 and 1025. We argue that these same three elements are represented in the original configuration of Serpent Mound and therefore situate its design and original construction in the Early Fort Ancient period.

The introduction and use of glass in Late Bronze Age Egypt (18th to 19th Dynasties) is discussed from a materiality-based approach. It is suggested that the artificiality of this new material was deliberately proclaimed, highlighting the ability of those behind its production to access the processes of creation and transformation. Colour is central to the arguments presented, and it is suggested that glass was valued for its ability to fully assume particular colours, rather than displaying these on the surface only in the manner of painted, glazed or gilded artefacts.

Coso Range rock drawings are a central subject and focus for debates positing alternative meanings and agents responsible for animal depictions in Great Basin prehistoric rock art. We present new evidence offering a middle ground between the divergent views of the ‘hunting religion, increase rites and overkill’ and the ‘shaman, visions and rain-making’ models. We argue that rock-art images, in general, possess multivocality and manifest imbricated conceptual metaphors operating on a variety of scales simultaneously. We recognize that Coso pictures, in one sense, metaphorically represent increase and renewal, human and animal fertility, and game animal magnification. Evidence for that perspective is presented including Coso bighorn with up-raised tails, ‘spirit arrows’, animals giving birth, those that appear pregnant, and an abundance of animals evidencing vitality and movement. Ritually adept shamans also appear to have often been the religious specialists or agents responsible for Coso rock art and the sources for fashioning these images were frequently visionary experiences.

The destruction of Indigenous rock art sites in the Pilbara district in Western Australia has become a natural sight within the mining landscape of the area. Whilst much of the destruction is explained as acts of vandalism and as a result of the industrial activities that are propelling the Australian economy, I claim that a new theory of iconoclasm is needed to explain fully this disastrous example of heritage conservation. Henceforth, in order to explain the destruction of the Murujuga/Burrup Peninsula petroglyphs, the largest archaeological site in the world, this paper develops the theory of landscape iconoclasm. This theory states that the destruction of Indigenous landscapes can be compared to the destruction of religious images, by analysing the inherent symbolic functions of iconoclasm, together with those of heritage, the better to elucidate the state of affairs in the Murujuga/Burrup Peninsula. Furthermore, by drawing from Aboriginal mythology and art-historical and anthropological theories, the theory of landscape iconoclasm is able to explain the destruction of archaeological sites within a framework that falls outside prevalent discourses of heritage.

Sardinian Neolithic rock-cut tombs are not merely underground repositories, but complex and dynamic ritual architectures whose sequence of chambers was designed to host elaborate programmes of death ritual. The internal walls of about 250 of these tombs are decorated with carvings and paintings depicting architectural structures, cattle-head motifs and geometric designs. Research has often focused on classifying the motifs into typo-chronological categories, and little attention has been paid to their architectural setting and how art actually interacts with the spaces and structures of the tombs. How were art and architecture combined to create a setting appropriate for deathways? The present article results from a systematic review of this art and discusses patterns in the distribution and position of the motifs inside the tombs. Motifs were repeatedly placed at a few specific locations, suggesting that they played an active role in standardized ritual uses of the tombs. It is argued that art significantly contributed to structure spaces, sequence rituals, shape the ceremonial experience of the tombs, and was therefore a key agent in Late Neolithic deathways.

This article addresses the problem of structural determinism in archaeological explanations of material culture change, specifically architecture. A discussion of Giddens' structuration theory emphasizes the duality of structure. The concept is updated by drawing on Gell's theory of agency in art and recent ideas on play, innovation, freedom and consensus prevalent in anthropology and archaeology. This approach shows that material culture is changed through structurally shaped innovation, such that agency is distributed across time, among groups regionally and among elites and commoners. The theoretical exposition develops a case study including discussion of an architectural grammar, ethnohistoric analogy and activity-area studies involving ceramic incense burners. The case study is the Classic–Postclassic transition (ad 750–1200) among the Maya of Petén, Guatemala. While earlier explanations of architectural change in this region focused on an in-migration event, the current investigation posits a Postclassic reconfiguration of Maya architecture, specifically changes in ‘C’-shaped stone benches, based on structurally shaped innovation and a distributed view of agency. The benches served as stages for more heterarchical ritual performances with the incense burners as opposed to the hierarchical ritual performances common in the Classic period. This account overcomes structural determinism by allowing for diversity and cultural specificity in our views of agency.

On the basis of recent archaeological evidence it seems that humans first entered the Australian continent about 60,000 years ago. These first ocean-going mariners had a high level of technological and economic skill, and had spread right across Australia into a wide variety of environments by about 35,000 years ago. Pigment showing clear signs of use occurs in almost all Australia's oldest known occupation sites, and evidence of self-awareness such as necklaces and beads has been found in several Pleistocene rock shelters. Rituals were carried out in connection with disposal of the dead, for at Lake Mungo there is a 25,000-year-old cremation, and ochre was scattered onto the corpse in a 30,000-year-old inhumation. Complex symbolic behaviour is attested at least 40,000 years ago by petroglyphs in the Olary district, and other evidence suggests a similar antiquity for rock paintings. The special focus of this article is cognitive archaeology, the study of past ways of thought as derived from material remains, particularly the development of early Australian artistic systems.

Despite growing strength in recent decades, an archaeology of childhood has often been overlooked by those studying prehistory. This is concerning because communities are enlivened by their children, and conversations with and about children often provide a critical arena for the discussion of aspects of societies which prehistorians are comfortable addressing, such as social structure, identity and personhood. Through an exploration of childhood as expressed in the Earlier Bronze Age burials from Ireland, this article demonstrates that neither written sources, artistic depictions nor toys are necessary to speak of children in the past. Indeed, an approach which tacks between scales reveals subtle trends in the treatment of children which speak to wider shared concerns and allows a reflection on the role of children in prehistory.

Approximately 400,000 years bp, novel technological behaviours appeared in the archaeological record, attested by evidence of the exploitation of previously unused resources and the production of new tools. I have reviewed such innovations, and I discuss them in the frame of the anthropological, palaeoneurological, genetic and behavioural changes that appeared in the Middle Pleistocene. I propose that at this chronology humans started to see the resources as ‘other-than-human’ sentient co-dwellers. The technological innovations expressed this novel cognitive complexity and the possible new things–things, human–things and environment–things relationships. Artefacts and technologies acquired multiple semiotic meanings that were strongly interconnected with the functional value. Ethnoarchaeological evidence suggested the possible symbolic acting beyond these innovations in material culture. This perspective has relevant implications in the archaeology of the ancient Palaeolithic. It suggests the need for a new view of material culture, one that goes beyond the classical list approach in the definition of modern symbolic mediated behaviour. Further, it allows one to overcome the traditional juxtaposition between ancient cultures and Homo sapiens in terms of complexity. The evidence discussed in this paper suggests that the ontological hypothesis could change our view of Middle Pleistocene hominids and the origin and definition of modern behaviour, and test the archaeological visibility of cognition in prehistory.

In this article, I set out a relational approach to Andean art, with the aim of investigating, in broad terms, the making, viewing and experience of art among pre-Hispanic peoples. The analysis draws upon the ideas of art historians, as well as upon the work of ethnographers and archaeologists, to integrate theoretical approaches that consider animacy and the ways art objects gain significance as part of assemblages. Examining four aspects of Andean art: (1) insistence; (2) abstraction; (3) networks and linkages; and (4) affect and embodied experience, I conclude that the term ‘art’ (as an analytic category) overlaps poorly with Andean categories of cognition, sociality and material practice. Archaeologists can usefully refocus attention on the ways these craft items were made, used in daily life, displayed in rituals and ultimately deposited in the places where they were found.

As a raw material, ivory has been used to manufacture a wide range of objects, normally associated with sumptuous material culture. In this article we explore the role played by ivory and ivory artefacts among early complex societies, and particularly its importance in the definition of identities among emergent elites. To this end, we make a thorough examination of the evidence from Copper Age Iberia, focusing on the mega-site of Valencina, in southern Spain. This site has provided what to date is the largest assemblage of prehistoric ivory in western Europe, with an estimated total of 8.8 kg, including finely crafted artefacts of unrivalled beauty and sophistication. Our study looks carefully at the technological, morphological and contextual dimensions of Copper Age ivory. As a result, we contend that the broad morphological variability together with the technological uniformity of this assemblage suggest that, while belonging to a common technological tradition, objects were deliberately crafted as unique and unrepeatable so that they could be used to create and maintain socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and ideological legitimation.

This article explores the potential of studying the social dimensions of old age and aged bodies in the past. Because old age is relative to life-expectancy figures, diet and lifestyle, calendric years are avoided when defining old age. Instead a composite approach is advocated that includes, for example, traces of wear and joint diseases to identify a threshold between adulthood and a period of seniority. The approach is applied to the Middle Neolithic burial ground Ajvide on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Eleven individuals (six men, five women, or 18 per cent of the 62 analysed burials) are regarded as ‘aged bodies’. At Ajvide a majority of these individuals are buried in graves that overlap earlier burials containing younger individuals of the same sex. It is argued that this pattern is due to eschatological ideas of ‘generational merging’ of bodies. This practice changes over time, which is suggested to be a part of the overall hybridization processes at the site.

‘Cosmovision in New World Ritual Landscapes’ is a Special Section including articles that explore portions of North, Central and South America where ceremonial or conceptual landscapes took differing forms. Two pivotal scholars (Ashmore, Broda) who have previously written on the subject are included in this group. Building upon themes of religious deity and other symbolic markers for clan territorial divisions (Sabo, Hilliard, Walker), urban settlement and modelling (Landau) and ethnographic information on ritual practice or cultural perspectives on land and spatial boundaries (Vining), these authors implicitly consider the possibility that cosmovision is a cultural universal. One unique aspect of their approach is the way that they connect varied landscapes with settlement concentrations or city centres, showing how cosmovision is evident in both rural and central place making.

Investigation of British Mesolithic and Neolithic genomes suggests discontinuity between the two and has been interpreted as indicating a significant migration of continental farmers, displacing the indigenous population. These incomers had already acquired some hunter-gatherer genetic heritage before their arrival, and this increased little in Britain. However, the proportion of hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry in British Neolithic genomes is generally greater than for most contemporary examples on the continent, particularly in emerging evidence from northern France, while the ultimate origin of British Neolithic populations in Iberia is open to question. Both the date calculated for the arrival of new people in Britain and their westerly origin are at odds with other aspects of the existing evidence. Here, a two-phase model of Neolithization is proposed. The first appearance of Neolithic things and practices significantly predated a more substantial transfer of population, creating the conditions under which new communities could be brought into being. The rather later establishment of a major migration stream coincided with an acceleration in the spread of Neolithic artefacts and activities, as well as an enrichment of the Neolithic material assemblage.

Rock-art researchers have long acknowledged the importance of discerning superimposition sequences as a means for exploring chronology. Despite their potential for reconstructing painting events and thus informing on a site's production sequences, the social significance of superimpositions and their associated meanings have been little explored. In the Kimberley Region of northwestern Australia, interpretations of superimpositions as an analytical lens have often lingered on the ‘negative’ connotations of this practice (e.g. to destroy supernatural power embedded in previous paintings and/or to show cultural dominance). As a result, it has been proposed that the overpainting of previous images was tantamount to defacing, leading to the proposition that new images constituted a form of vandalism of older art. In this paper, a sample of rock-art sites from the northwestern and northeastern Kimberley is analysed with the aim of grounding the study of superimpositions in more nuanced practices, leading researchers to contemplate the role they played among populations within the same area. It is argued here that superimpositions brought together past and present experiences that served to reinforce the links between contemporary art production and the inherited landscape.

Archaeology, defined as the study of material culture, extends from the first preserved human artefacts up to the present day, and in recent years the ‘Archaeology of the Present’ has become a particular focus of research. On one hand are the conservationists seeking to preserve significant materials and structures of recent decades in the face of redevelopment and abandonment. On the other are those inspired by social theory who see in the contemporary world the opportunity to explore aspects of material culture in new and revealing ways, and perhaps above all the central question of the extent to which material culture — be it in the form of objects or buildings — actively defines the human experience. Victor Buchli's An Archaeology of Socialism takes as its subject a twentieth-century building — the Narkofim Communal House in Moscow — and seeks to understand it in terms of domestic life and changing policies of the Soviet state during the 70 or so years since its construction. Thus Buchli's study not only concerns the meaning of material culture in a modern context, but focuses specifically on the household — or more accurately on a series of households within a single Russian apartment block. A particular interest attaches to the way in which the building was planned to encourage communal living, during a pre-Stalinist phase when the State sought to intervene directly in domestic life through architectural design and the manipulation of material culture. Subsequent political changes brought a revision of modes of living within the Narkofim apartment block, as the residents adjusted and responded to changing political and social pressures and demands. The significance of Buchli's study goes far beyond the confines of Soviet-era Moscow or indeed the archaeology of the modern world. He questions the role and potential danger of social and archaeological theory of the totalizing kind: a natural response perhaps to the experience of the Narkofim Communal House as an exercise in Soviet social engineering. He poses fascinating questions about the relation between individual households and the state ideology, and he emphasizes the role of material culture studies in reaching an understanding of these processes. In the brief essay that opens this Review Feature, Victor Buchli outlines the principal aims and conclusions of An Archaeology of Socialism. The diversity of issues that the book generates is revealed in the series of reviews which follows, touching in particular upon the ways in which routines of daily life — archaeologically visible, perhaps, through the analysis of domestic space — relate to structures of authority in society as a whole.