Humans define themselves through personhood as agents in society. To become persons, children differentiate their self from others. They take, as George Mead (1934) says, the other and self-objectify by predicating a sign-image or trope upon themselves. Birth rituals realize these tropes with the child's body as tool and raw material. Birth almanacs in Highland Mexican codices depict, as I argue, the transformation of a child into a person. Patron gods pierce the child, display it, manipulate its umbilical cord and nurse it. Gods provide the child with vital life forces while the child and future adult nourishes the gods through sacrifice. The birth almanacs situate Aztec personhood in a covenant of humans with gods. As children mature, bodily changes metonymically express the metaphoric relationship of the children with their patron gods. In the bathing ceremony, fellow humans — especially the child's parents and the midwife — step into the roles of the patron gods and perform the above activities on the child. Aztec children other themselves in gods through ritual practices. By connecting the ideology and practice of personhood, the birth almanacs are a theory of social action.

Western Zhou archaeology (1046–771 bc) is dominated by cemetery- and mortuary-related data. To date most studies have relied on later historical narratives and focused on the investigation of elites and their mortuary practices. This paper sets out to provide a renewed approach to the study of Western Zhou cemeteries by looking at the graveyard as a whole and with it the relationship between the commoners and nobles who were buried in them. Its case study is the important site of Tianma-Qucun, located in modern-day Shanxi province, the residential site and burial ground of the Jin state during the Western Zhou period. We provide a community-focused study of mortuary practices aimed at uncovering local-specific shared ways of doings things. This approach not only affords a refined vision of Western Zhou mortuary ritual and practice, but also one where local variation and appropriations can be appreciated as well. Thus, while common Zhou mortuary traditions should be understood to have been of greater import to Zhou elites, their impact on the lower echelons of society remains less clear. By examining the mortuary practices of individual communities, we aim to uncover these site-specific manifestations in their larger contexts.

In the last 20 years, demography has re-emerged as a key research area within archaeology. This research has refined archaeological demographic methods and examined the relationships between demographic, cultural and environmental change. Here, I discuss how the results of the growing corpus of archaeological demographic studies can contribute to gender archaeology, aiding the incorporation of women into narratives of the past. By considering the important role of women in the demographic regimes of small-scale societies, I explain how archaeological demography can provide insights into the behaviour and lives of women, without relying on the often problematic identification of gendered artefacts, activities and/or places. Archaeological demography as a tool for gender archaeology also permits a move away from the female empiricism of simply adding women into archaeological narratives, to provide an alternative framework for the analysis of gender roles and practices. I demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this approach using an example from the Upper Palaeolithic of southwestern France.

The pre-Hispanic art of the Lowlands of Paraná comprises very realistic to extremely simplified ceramic figurines made by complex hunter-gatherer groups during the Late Holocene. In particular, the article seeks to discuss the differences found between parrot and raptor figures, which are the most frequent motifs. Alternative styles of representation were involved in the visual symbolism of the two groups of birds with well-differentiated morphological and behavioural attributes. Whereas parrot images were elaborated with greater naturalism in sites mostly located in the middle Paraná, birds of prey exhibit a higher degree of stylization and schematization, especially in the lower Paraná. It is proposed that the differences in the artistic modalities used to represent these groups of birds could be related to the positioning of these animals within different metaphorical domains and opposable conceptual categories. It is also suggested that this iconography could be specifically linked to a totemic ontology, which implies a particular attitude towards nature. This study attempts to contribute to broadening our knowledge about the symbolic relationships between humans and animals in pre-Columbian America.

Gender is under focus in prehistoric archaeology, with traditional binary models being questioned and alternatives formulated. Quantification, however, is generally lacking, and alternative models are rarely tested against the archaeological evidence. In this article, we test the binary hypothesis of gender for prehistoric Central Europe based on a selection of seven published burial sites dating from the Early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. Results show that the binary model holds for the majority of individuals, but also supports the existence of non-binary variants. We address such variants as ‘minorities’ rather than ‘exceptions’, as only the former can be integrated in interpretive models. However, we also find that quantification is undermined by several sources of error and systematic bias.

This contribution contrasts ‘Assemblage theory’ with more traditional archaeological understandings of the term ‘assemblage’. It is argued that the flat ontology of assemblage theory is productive, particularly in relation to scale, enabling archaeologists to describe their own materials more precisely. However, more traditional ‘assemblages’, perhaps as a result of the more restrictive view they provide, should not be neglected, as they generate particularly archaeological perspectives and effects.

The post-processual archaeology that dominated the scholarship of Anglo-American academics in the 1980s and 1990s now lies moribund, done in by an ‘ontological turn’ in the study of anthropology that began some 15 or 20 years ago. Anthropos is no longer the sole focal point; human beings no longer occupy the central place in our understanding of cultures and societies. As contemporary anthropologists have noted, human actions and ideas are not the lone contributors to the creation of a civilization's structures and objects or the development of societal forms. Other kinds of ‘life’, a variety of other non-human organisms contribute to their creation as well. They most notably include places and what we generally refer to as things: objects, constructions and materials. In effect, they include all the organic and non-organic components of the world about us. These are the ‘beings’, both animate and inanimate, that ‘make’ the world. Moreover, ‘things’ are no longer regarded as pure inert ‘objects’, only created or transformed by the will of humans or the force of their technology. The present transformations of the Anthropocene, which is producing climatic changes at a global scale, are pushing us to consider that ‘natural’ events—such as floods or hurricanes—may be the direct result of human actions and material ‘things’—such as the earth and the oceans—may be active agents of change. In other words, they are also the subjects of history.

In their introduction to the discussion of Beiläufigkeit in archaeology, Pollock, Bernbeck, Appel, Loy and Schreiber build pleasingly on the theme of what Daniel Miller refers to as the ‘humility’ of physical things (2010, 50). By this he means that objects do not determine or prescribe the actions of human beings, but mutely establish the circumstances under which we operate, conditioning our expectations of how to proceed. Things are often not conspicuously meaningful, but unobtrusive or ‘hiding in plain sight’ and bringing about unacknowledged effects (Alvis 2017, 212). This state of affairs has been recognized by both the phenomenological tradition and the more recent ‘new materialisms’, but what I want to suggest in this contribution is that these perspectives implicitly indicate that things can be ‘incidental’ in a variety of subtly different ways.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of the metalworker in the northwest Iberian Iron Age. By adopting a holistic and diachronic perspective, a broad review of the influence of metalworking and its agents on the social structuring of the communities of the Atlantic seaboard is presented. With the aim of exploring the implications of metallurgy and the blacksmith's activity, a new perspective of metalworking is suggested. Thus, an exploration of perspectives beyond the technical aspects will be addressed, considering the ‘technological dimension’ as part of all the elements that define this activity. The objective of the work is to present a narrative that allows analysis of the role of the metalworker throughout different historical periods, focusing on the social, technical and symbolic dynamics that have shaped its development.

Using examples drawn from the European Upper Palaeolithic, this article advocates a visual cultures approach to studying the art of this period. Visual culture is defined as the biological, cognitive and social underpinnings of how we see, while the term art refers to what we see. A visual cultures approach to these images allows the archaeologist to explore how they were experienced, decoded and innovated upon within historically situated, overlapping and entangled communities of practice and further affords archaeologists the tools and the vocabulary they need to explore apprenticeship, active teaching, embodied cognition, situated learning, scaffolding, enskillment, the existence of chaînes opératoires and the impact of these materials on the human brain. European Upper Palaeolithic finger flutings are presented as a case study of the visual cultures approach.

In 1994, H. de Lumley's teams of researchers finished the colossal task—initiated more than 20 years earlier—of recording every pecked rock engraving of Mont Bégo's rock art. The following year, in the book Le grandiose et le sacré, Lumley defined the site as a sacred mountain and attributed rock engravings, considered as ex-votos, to the Early Bronze Age and the Bell Beaker period. However, it is hard to recognize what interpretations can be directly drawn from the data: some exceptional rock engravings are considered as representative of the whole corpus of rock engravings and the most numerous ones are considered as a ‘bruit de fond’ [background noise]. Furthermore, recognition of associations—where rock engravings are contemporaneous and significantly grouped—had been criticised, and the hypothesis that all the rock engravings can be considered as a single archaeological event seems also to be contradicted by studies of superimpositions. We developed a GIS and a comprehensive database, with statistics, to identify specific spatial configurations, seriation effects and, finally, the evolution of the rock art. By going further in the periodization, our aim is to propose some provisional hypotheses about the meaning of Mont Bégo's rock engravings.

Architecture has been one of the key features in studying the first millennium bc in the Balearic Islands. The primary goal of this research is to analyse how monumental communal architecture enabled the construction of enduring social spaces and how the role of these spaces within the community can be understood through the relations that conform across the landscape. To do so we will focus on the Late Bronze Age (1100–850 bc) and the Talayotic period (c. 850–650 bc), the first moment when cyclopean dry-stone architecture is used in communal spaces, such as talayots or stepped turriforms, making them stand out across the landscape. To understand how these architectures are connected, we analysed the visual connections between them through intervisibility and network analysis, as well as through Individual Distance Viewsheds. Through the analysis of visual connections, we seek to understand how the architecture created a network across the entire landscape, and how the characteristics and properties of this network are key in understanding the relationship between Talayotic communities and their landscape. Our aim is to explore how architecture shaped and gave meaning to the landscape and how we cannot understand the buildings by themselves, but as part of a network.

In this paper, we discuss the occurrence of lions, bears and leopards in south Levantine archaeological assemblages between the last glacial maximum (c. 25,000 years ago) and the Iron Age (c. 2500 years ago). We argue that the occurrence of these large carnivores constitutes a significant long-term cultural feature that begins with the first settled hunter-gatherer communities of the Natufian culture. Importantly, we show that carnivoran species representation in the archaeological record shifts through time, with leopards common during the Neolithic and lions and bears during the Bronze and Iron ages. These shifts, we suggest, are best understood as reflecting the interplay between costly signalling and symbolism as they interacted through processes of increasing socio-political complexity.

The relationship between handmilling, undertaken in domestic contexts, and mechanized mills in medieval Kent is used to challenge linear approaches to economic progress in the Middle Ages. Inspired by posthuman perspectives which emphasize messiness, non-linearity and multiplicity, medieval economic development is re-imagined as a patchwork of intensive material processes. In so doing, an approach is developed which works towards dissolving problematic binaries between gendered labour, domestic and economic spheres and the Middle Ages and modernity.

Diplomatic relations between the 18th-dynasty Egyptian court and the polities of the Aegean Bronze Age are gaining increasing scholarly attention. The work conducted so far on chronological synchronization has established a relatively firm base for further discussions on social relations. The role of the prestige objects arriving from the Aegean to Egypt has not received the same attention. This is partly because our knowledge of these objects is restricted to Egyptian visual representations in tombs of the officials and not the imported objects per se. This paper will discuss the transformative capacities of Egyptian decorum in regards to the foreign prestige objects of the Aegean provenance arriving in the Egyptian 18th-dynasty court. We first have to understand the iconographical phenomena of transference, hybridization and creativity in Egyptian visual culture, and only then may we attempt to read any historical reality behind them. These transformative representational processes are crucial for the understanding of the reception and the memory of the Aegean objects.

The distribution of designs on Mesopotamian terracottas can provide clues to the relationship between symbols and meaning at different localities. Unlike other Mesopotamian terracottas whose iconography reflects pan-Mesopotamian beliefs, the designs on model chariots are site-specific. While Mesopotamian religious symbols should probably be interpreted as representing aspects of divine power rather than individual deities, combinations of symbols serve to identify particular gods. When these are found on model chariots, they can be related to the titular deities of the specific city in which they were found. Examination of the findspots of these objects, especially those from Mashkanshapir, suggests a possible link between model chariots and the centralizing institutions of the city.

This article presents evidence for the shifting economic networks and cultural relationships between the Jovel Valley of highland Chiapas, and the Gulf Coast lowlands. In particular, we examine material culture of Gulf Coast origin or influence at the hilltop monumental centre of Moxviquil during the Late Classic (ad 600–900) and Early Postclassic (ad 900–1250) periods. These artifacts include a fine orange cylindrical pedestal vase, two examples of ‘portable sculpture’, two anthropomorphic incense burner lids and a whistle (ocarina) in the shape of a kneeling woman. The patterns of curation and disposal of these objects at Moxviquil suggests differences in the way that Gulf Coast-referencing objects were incorporated into social memory and ritual behaviour.

During the middle and late Holocene, the prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara articulated their agency under conditions of aridification in part through aesthetic symbolic behaviour that became petrified, as it were, in ubiquitous rock art. Rock art, predominantly depicting domestic animals, continued to be produced throughout the later Holocene, despite deteriorating environmental conditions that necessitated other adaptive strategies. Artistic production appears to have ignored the environmental changes and evolved an aesthetic that, initially, celebrated animals for the function for which they were domesticated and, subsequently, for their looks, symbolic capital and potential to express status. In the most recent periods, art production evolves into a symbolism that is entirely based on, and communicated through, camel imagery.