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.

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.

Late Early Bronze Age (EB IIB–III, 2500–2000 bc) evidence from the northeast Peloponnese and central Crete present two coeval sequences of events with very different societal outcomes. By drawing on resilience theory and the model of adaptive cycles, this article explores when and why the paths of mainland Greece and Crete diverged around 2200 bc, leading to an eventually destabilizing change on the mainland and a more sustainable one on Crete. It is argued that the two EB II societal structures were more similar than current discourse generally allows. However, during some hundred years leading up to the end of the EB II period, an increased societal uniformity and a decrease of social arenas on northeast Peloponnese may in the end have circumscribed the Early Helladic communities’ room to manoeuvre. Conversely, through strong regionalism and greater multiplicity of social arenas, Early Minoan societies seem to have retained a greater level of socio-economic variability that enabled proactiveness and sustained expansion through ideological change.

This paper explores the biography of a wagon road located in the First Nations (indigenous) territory of the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley in southern British Columbia, Canada. While the road is best known as a route to the Fraser Canyon during the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, here I investigate its multiple lives. Adopting themes from symmetrical archaeology, I show that the wagon road was not a passive outcome of colonial action but instead shifted in form and meaning as it interacted with the human and non-human world. I draw on archival documents from the Royal Engineers and oral accounts from the Stl'atl'imx of the lower Lillooet River Valley to illustrate how people, places and things were woven into the landscape through bodily engagement with the road. This paper thus highlights the complexity of the colonial encounter and the importance of movement and the materiality of movement (roads) in understanding the diversity of interaction in tensioned landscapes.

Bisson (2001) proposes that imposition of form in Middle Palaeolithic scrapers can be recognized when the rules for scraper manufacture, which are based upon functional considerations, are known. He derives these ‘scraper production rules’ on the basis of experiments with novice flintknappers, and finds that they apply to Neanderthal-manufactured Mousterian scrapers. He interprets the violation of these rules in scrapers from Skhul Cave as evidence that anatomically modern humans imposed form on their stone tools, and therefore had mental templates. This study provides evidence that the ‘scraper production rules’ are not, in fact, the rules according to which Neanderthals made their tools. Instead, they reflect flaking mechanics and elements of Bisson's experimental design rather than any functional considerations taken into account during scraper manufacture. Furthermore, methodological flaws in Bisson's analysis of Middle Palaeolithic artefacts undermine his arguments that archaeological scrapers either follow or violate the rules. These problems render untenable his conclusion that Neanderthals did not have mental templates and that they lacked flexibility and innovation in stone-tool making.

Humans have been producing ‘art’ for at least 75,000 years. But the word ‘art’ is problematic when applied to archaeology. This paper explores the use of the concept of ‘visually complex object’ to designate a very specific kind of what is generally known as ‘art’. I argue for the application of this concept to the analysis of both the design of objects and their arrangement in cultural spaces, to gain new perspectives on social and political change in a prehistoric complex society. The focus here is on visually enchanting objects and changes in the ways that such objects were used and arranged in relation to larger changes in cultural circumstances. I contrast two visual orders in Iron Age Europe—the mid final millennium bc, when the visual order of ‘princely graves’ and the eye-fixing qualities of objects focused attention on the persons of individuals competing for leadership positions; and the second and final centuries bc, when a new visual order emerged to focus attention on large, publicly deployed objects that directed attention in open spaces to create collective experiences. The principles developed from these examples from late prehistoric Europe can be applied to changes in other complex societies worldwide.

The global distribution of cowrie shells (Monetaria annulus and Monetaria moneta) attests to their exchange over long distances and their value in diverse cultural contexts. In addition to their commodification, cowries functioned as adornment, ritual, art and in the elaboration of both living and ancestral beings in many settings through time. Examining the circulation and usage of cowries in these different contexts facilitates an exploration of the ways in which a global commodity may carry, lose and acquire value. An ethnographic review of cowrie use in the hitherto overlooked context of southern Africa suggests that particular qualities of the shell imbued it with culturally specific value. It is suggested that cowries, as part of divination sets, were active in divination because of their white colour and their origin in the (maritime) ancestral realm that anchored divination in notions of ancestry, fertility and healing. Furthermore, in certain contexts, cowries were conceived of as animate objects, metonymically active in ‘cooling’ and healing. These observations, set within a broader discussion relating to archaeological approaches to the accumulation of value, indicate the importance of exploring alternative ontologies in the biographies of global commodities, and reveal the potential of a biographical ontology of the ‘ancestral’.

The relationship between material culture and ethnicity is an important topic of social science research, but review of the literature shows that archaeologists were more interested in ceramics and to a certain extent in metals and mortuary practices. Other material artefacts such as basketry or architecture attracted little attention, while elsewhere it has been shown that variations in techniques and architectural forms are used to emphasize or to disrupt ethnic distinctions. The Mandara data presented here and collected among three different ethnic groups (Podokwo, Muktele, Mura) show that houses are considered as more important compared to other material artefacts when one comes to speak about ethnicity. People used material practices related to houses to establish specific social parameters so as to differentiate themselves from others (e.g. the Podokwo), as a way to regulate marital relationships (e.g. the Muktele), and as a means to articulate cultural practices that determine interrelationships among rival clans (e.g. the Mura).

The work of time-making is always a work of the present, and even in its driest form, the archaeological chronology, is a political process. Archaeological practices which make time from space necessarily dissect unified material landscapes into temporal slices, ‘cuts’ of time and space that can either mute or give voice to past interactions with material landscapes, engagements sometimes called ‘the past in the past.’ Despite the fact that historical and archaeological remains in India are often central to political contestation, the structures and objects studied by archaeologists and art historians are typically viewed as straightforward exemplars of past periods, dynasties, or cultures, disappearing from gaze as they leave the period to which they ‘belong’. This article considers some forms of interaction between people and places in southern India—from ashmounds to megaliths to temples—interactions ‘out of time’ according to traditional archaeological practice, but which reveal past contestations and concerns. Such forms of landscape history require both analytical techniques such as chronologies which divide time, as well as landscape-based approaches which can heal those divisions by allowing past action ‘out of place’ to be made visible.

This article presents evidence for prehistoric rice cultivation on the island of Jeju (Jejudo), Korea. It also discusses sociopolitical contexts in which the people of this island decided to incorporate rice into their lifeways. Although Jejudo is culturally closely related to the southern region of the Korean peninsula, the nearest landmass to the island, their environmental conditions are radically different. Jejudo is not suitable for intensive rice cultivation. Archaeobotanical research at Yerae-dong nonetheless confirmed that rice was consumed earlier than the emergence of institutionalized social hierarchy on the island. The evidence for status competition and exchange networks contemporaneous with rice remains raises the suggestion that rice was initially incorporated as an exotic and luxurious food, rather than a daily necessity. The earliest rice on Jejudo is unlikely to have been transferred to the island as a result of tributary trade between ancient states. Rather, this study demonstrated that the main agents of rice cultivation were the emergent local elites who attempted to express status and consolidate hierarchy with foreign objects.

This article develops recent interpretations of mortuary practices as contexts for producing social memory and personhood to argue that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and genealogy. Commemorative strategies are identified in the composite character, shape and location of cairns and in their relationship with other commemorative monuments, namely Class I symbol-stones. The argument is developed through a consideration of the excavations of early medieval cists and cairns at Lundin Links in Fife.

Two recent studies—the first by MacDonald & Roebroeks (2013), the second by Tallerman (2013)—draw inferences about the social use of language by premodern hominins from data about the linguistic behaviour of modern hunter-gatherers and other modern people with traditional cultures. Such inferences cannot be sound, though, unless they meet a particular requirement: they need appropriate warrants. These have to serve as conceptual bridges that span the ontological gap between the behaviours and capacities of modern humans and those of the premodern hominins concerned. Interestingly, both MacDonald & Roebroeks and Tallerman make a serious attempt to support their respective inferences with the aid of such conceptual bridges. The present article inquires whether these bridges are strong enough to serve this purpose, and argues that both bridges have components that are harmful to their solidity. In the process of arguing this, the article pursues the question of the conditions under which uniformitarian assumptions can be used as components of the substructure of the conceptual bridges needed for underpinning inferences about the use of language in the teaching and learning of subsistence skills by premodern hominins. More generally, the article elucidates an important limitation of the ethnographic record as a putative window on the evolution of language.

Time and change have been among the most widely discussed themes in archaeological theory, though they have varying fortunes in the vicissitudes of academic life. British and American anthropology, it has been observed, have long oscillated between history and evolution, between studying culture in its local context and in a long-term narrative. Following Steward and White rather than Kroeber and Boas, the New Archaeology's banner was evolution, and many of its theoretical goals were explicitly reductionist, for example, in viewing human actions as a local response to large-scale environmental conditions. Yet, at the same time, from its inception the New Archaeology also contained the seeds of a humanistic, historical approach (for instance, in tracing social stratification to chiefly power strategies to local, short-term political contexts).

The Cogotas I culture (c. 1800–1150 cal. bc) is an unusual test case in Bronze Age Europe with its incomplete definition due to empirical and epistemological difficulties. The idiosyncratic materiality of those small-scale communities is poorly understood because of its unexpected nature. The characteristic evidence is limited to formal deposits and accumulations of secondary residues whose survival was decisively driven by prehistoric social practices. Thus, in the absence of intact activity areas or dwellings, normative burials and representative domestic equipment, alternative lines of enquiry are needed. However, standard interpretative models have proposed mismatching socio-economic accounts or misleading narratives envisioning these societies as regressive and isolated. This updated multi-scalar review covers from the high level of cultural demarcation and territorial representation to the micro-scale stories of human–things relationships. The lifestyles and worldviews in Cogotas I societies entailed the upholding of atavistic habits, a relational cosmology and a strategy of transient durability, which ultimately resulted in their characteristic archaeological invisibility.

As a ceramic artist, I was surprised to find that archaeological research gives little attention to the extraordinary sensorial qualities of Jōmon flame pots. To understand why, I consider the challenges of including sensory experience in archaeological method and the problems of leaving it out. Turning to the typological approach to Jōmon pottery, I highlight the assumptions it makes about cognition before introducing Material Engagement Theory (MET) as an alternative. A MET-oriented reanalysis of the typological evidence places sensation at the centre of enquiry and removes the need to interpret symbolic, representational content. Through MET, I consider the sensorial qualities of flame pots, not as prehistory but as they appeared recently and unexpectantly during the process of modelling clay into sculptures for a contemporary art project. Flame pots joined conceptually with the explorative activity of clay. A prehistoric/contemporary artefact/modelling system was created and developed itself into a method of monitoring intra-systemic experience—clayful phenomenology. The findings cover five themes: enacted agency, iconicity from indexicality, bending rules/undermining habits, the choreography of material engagement and the phenomenology of space.

The increasing use of Bayesian-modelled absolute chronologies has met with calls for more sophisticated accounts of not just our perception of archaeological time, but also of past temporal experience. Using a case study of fourth-millennium bc Egypt this article seeks to address this. It is a period that has long been perceived through a detailed relative framework, a legacy of Flinders Petrie's development of seriation. Yet this legacy imparted more than a framework, for its origins within nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism veiled an explanatory apparatus that encourages linear and gradualist narratives of Predynastic development. By setting a new series of absolute dates within a historically informed critique of relative dating it is possible to question previous assumptions concerning tempos of change. This does not obviate relative typologies, however. Rather it encourages us to ask new questions as to what they might represent. It is argued that in evaluating new absolute measurements of time with reference to ritual activity that distinctive temporalities in the transformation of society can be discerned, ones in which world's first territorial state became a social reality for past communities.

At the time of the Spanish invasion, central Andean society was organized around ayllus. These extensive social units, bound together by kinship, reciprocity, land claims, honoured ancestors and other criteria, are an example of the kin-based sodalities that have long been seen in political science as impediments to state development. Class should replace kin when large and complex polities like the Inca Empire form, and groups like the ayllu should fade away. This article seeks to re-evaluate the role played by kin-based sodalities in early state formation and expansion through a case study of the Wari State (ce 600–1000). We argue that the decades-long development of ayllus was a reaction to incipient urbanization, surging interregional interaction and the other challenges associated with Wari's rise. Ayllu development created a more heterarchical political structure that would endure some 200 years into the polity's existence. Elite efforts to consolidate power in the ninth century ce ultimately led to the polity's decline and highlight the need to develop more dynamic models of urbanization and state formation in the Andes and elsewhere.

This paper is about Bronze Age round barrows and the ways in which they became caught up in human practices over an extended time period. At one level it belongs to a flourishing body of work that examines the ‘re-use’ or ‘biography’ of prehistoric monuments. Rather than treating the latter as a generic group, however, this study focuses on chronologies of one specific monument type—round barrows—over a 2600-year period from 1500 bc–ac 1086. By bringing together evidence and interpretations generated mainly within period specialisms, significant homogeneities are revealed in terms of how activities at prehistoric monuments have previously been understood. The possibilities for seeking out different interpretative ground are duly explored. Using a case study from the east of England and drawing on evidence and ideas from much more broadly, the approach taken places particular emphasis on examining relationships between round barrows and other aspects of landscape. The findings offer fresh insight into the temporality of activities undertaken at round barrows, question existing characterizations of past people's historical understandings, and explore the long-term coherence of ‘round barrows’ as a category.

A recently discovered painted pottery vessel from the Predynastic cemetery of Umm el-Qaab in Abydos, Egypt (early fourth millennium bc), bears one of the most sophisticated proto-historic scenes surviving from the ancient Near East. The excavators interpreted the scene as a depiction of warfare. A systematic analysis of its various components, however, as well as two similar contemporary scenes, suggests that the scene depicts dancing. It is even possible that the scene represents four stages in a sequence of movement. If so, it is one of the earliest movement notation documents preserved from antiquity.

In this paper we study several panels with incised engravings, which have been discovered in recent years, from two shelters in the area of the River Martín (Teruel), Cañada de Marco and Los Borriquitos. They are of great scientific interest for several reasons. Firstly, because they represent an expansion of the Late Upper Palaeolithic engraving facies of Mediterranean Iberia, limited until now to ten sites. In these two new sites, these incised engravings are underlying Levantine and Schematic pictographs, and occasionally are interstratified with Levantine paintings, an exceptional fact which is published in its entirety for the first time. These stratigraphic relationships reflect continuity/change dynamics during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and throughout the Holocene artistic cycle, topics which are crucial on a European scale. Finally, we have identified iconographic continuities between Epimagdalenian engravings and Levantine art, suggesting a possible link between these two graphic expressions. These findings may constitute solid support for the hypothesis about the pre-Neolithic origin of the exceptional Levantine art of the Iberian peninsula.

In memoriam Ramiro Alloza