Poverty in ancient Egypt remains a rarely-studied subject. For decades Egyptologists have focused their attention mainly on the so-called ‘elite’, while the poor, their housing, their possessions, their diet, or their cultural values, remain largely in the shadows. Although they are much less visible archaeologically, they were much more numerous than the wealthy. Despite these circumstances, ancient Egypt provides a good starting point for discussing how to approach poverty during antiquity, as there are archaeological and textual records that can shed light on this complex issue. This article aims to stimulate reflection on the issue of poverty in the Nile valley and how it can be explored. It seeks also to add nuance to the idea of a strict dichotomy opposing the poor to the elite. In so doing, this paper will present discussion of the definition of poverty.

In this paper, we examine the lunar calendar interpretation to evaluate whether it is a viable explanation for the production of Upper Palaeolithic parietal art. We consider in detail the history of this approach, focusing on recently published variations on this interpretation. We then discuss the scientific method and whether these recent studies are designed to address the research questions necessary to test a lunar calendar hypothesis. More broadly, we explore challenges related to inferring meaning in art of the deep past, the use of secondary sources and selecting appropriate ethnographic analogies. Finally, we assess claims that the lunar calendar interpretation documents the world's oldest (proto)writing system. We conclude that the lunar calendar interpretation as currently construed suffers from multiple theoretical and methodological weaknesses preventing it from being a viable explanation for the production of Upper Palaeolithic art. We further find that claims following from this interpretation to have discovered the oldest known (proto)writing system are unsubstantiated.

It is now 25 years since Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (henceforth SSA) was first published in 1982. Why run a review feature upon a book this old? Clearly not to let readers know about its now-familiar contents. One justification is historical. Very few works have had such an effect — in archaeology, the nearest parallel comes with works such as Binford and Binford's New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968, which laid the basis for an entire agenda of New Archaeology. Like Binford and Binford's book, SSA marked a transformation of archaeology as much as, or more than, it actually transformed the field itself. It signalled the coming of age of a coherent cohort of young, energetic scholars with a strongly defined new agenda. It breached taken-for-granted limits with bold, even flagrant ambition; it consciously invoked new intellectual frames. As much as any particular publishing event can punctuate the scholarly process with the intimation of a new direction, the publication of SSA did so.

And yet, a review feature on the book would perhaps not be entirely justified as purely a historical retrospective. It is clear from the trajectory of theoretical publication in Britain (and to some extent America) over the last decades, from the content of archaeological theory courses in universities, and the vocabulary bounced around at conferences such as TAG and the SAAs, that the agenda of SSA — often termed ‘post-processualism’ — has become the dominant voice in mainstream archaeological theory. The challenger has become the establishment; the once-unthinkable has become normal science. There are many other theoretical voices, of course, but even self-proclaimed alternative movements show signs of having absorbed, osmotically, much of the theoretical agenda set by post-processualism, even if their answers differ.

Twenty-five is a human generation, and perhaps the closest approach to eternity in the rapidly fermenting world of theory; the current generation of students (future colleagues, really) will have known no other paradigm. Hence, we have asked our contributors not only to comment retrospectively upon the book itself, but also prospectively, on how well its agenda has weathered the years, on what roads remain untaken, and upon where they think the future might lie.

Based on the identification of modern dung remains on the TT123 tomb wall, I propose to think of TT123 in new ways, looking for other possible realities besides those produced by the processes of recognition, identification and categorization that dominate the archaeological interpretive process. The idea is to seek to understand TT123 from new traditions and new knowledge to produce something new. The idea is not to ask what TT123 means, but to understand how it works within the different possible encounters in which it is inserted. More than offering just another point of view in relation to those with epistemic privilege, I will try to demonstrate that other realities are possible and that such alternative realities can have political and material consequences. An alternative reality is not reality, it is only a potential reality.

Spoken language is one of the defining human characteristics — the crucial accomplishment which makes us human and separates us from other species. Naturally enough, the origins of this accomplishment — which must lie somewhere back in the Palaeolithic — have been the subject of lively and often heated debate, not least since speech leaves no direct material residues. Many people have sought to resolve the question by careful analysis of the material remains of early hominids. But do patterns of tool-making or evidence of sophisticated subsistence strategies really provide an adequate base from which to deduce the presence of linguistic ability? Furthermore, is language inextricably bound up with the ability to vocalize and to speak? Are studies of the vocal tract of Neanderthals or Homo erectus really relevant to the question of language origins?

The wide diversity of view on the antiquity of human spoken language is very clear from the brief contributions which make up this feature. On the one hand is the evidence for the presence of Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the brain of Homo habilis around 2 million years ago. Does this provide grounds for believing that Homo habilis could speak? Did the use of tools as icons by Homo erectus play a key role in the development of human spoken language? Or should we instead go along with the growing consensus — supported by many linguists —that spoken language is a late addition to the range of human abilities, originating along with fully modern humans only within the last 200,000 years? And dare we go even further, and nominate Africa as the locus of language origin?

The time may come when we are able to specify not only when human spoken language first developed, but also where. For the present, however, the debate shows no sign of imminent resolution. In the pages which follow, we bring together the views of archaeologists from a number of different backgrounds; but we begin with a linguist's perspective, and seven propositions to set the scene for the archaeological enquiry.

Over the last twenty years experimental psychology has revived interest in the Golden Section, showing it to have some influence not only in visual perception but also in a certain kind of value judgement. The findings are here tested on ancient Egyptian sources, both archaeological and textual. They lead to a discussion of how Egyptian architects designed their buildings, and also to a consideration of the cognitive processes involved in modern analyses of the plans of ancient buildings by means of diagrammatic proportional schemes.

Posthumanist approaches in archaeology have given plenty of focus to things in the last decade. This focus on things is a reaction to the over-anthropocentric view of social life advanced by postprocessual archaeologists. Whereas agency of more than 10 years ago was about how individuals expressed purpose and identity, agency today is about how both humans and non-human objects affect one another in a symmetrical manner. It seems without doubt that Posthumanism has contributed greatly to new understandings of social reality, but in the process it has also forced archaeologists to sacrifice many topics of interest, namely those involving consciousness and purpose. But is this sacrifice really necessary? This is one of the central problems of Posthumanism: it disallows a compromise of ideas from more conventional social theory (e.g. norms, purpose, practice) with those of posthumanist theory. This paper revisits John Searle's ‘Chinese Room’ and reiterates what this thought-experiment meant to understanding consciousness and purpose. The thought-experiment highlighted the differences between humans and machines and demonstrated that, even if a machine could replicate human purpose, it would still not be considered human because, unlike mechanical processes, human purpose is based on ethics. The thought-experiment was the first step in debunking the computational theory of mind. In light of this thought-experiment, the paper argues that, in a world where things interact with humans, we should think of agency in terms of ethics and keep the focus on humans.

The causes of the disappearance of Late Chalcolithic society (Ghassulian) in the early fourth millennium bc remain obscure. This study identifies the collapse as the consequence of a change in the approach to metallurgy from cosmological fundament (Late Chalcolithic) to a practical craft (EB1). This endogenous transition accounts for the cultural recession characterizing the transitional period (EB1A) and the discontinuity in ritual practices. The new practical approach in metallurgy is firstly observed in the southern margin of the Ghassulian culture, which produced copper for distribution in the Nile valley rather than the southern Levant. Nevertheless, the Ghassulian cultural markers visible in the newly emerging areas of copper working (southern coastal plain, Nile valley) denote the survival of the old cosmological traditions among metalworkers of the EB1 culture. Their religious expression unveils the extension of the Ghassulian beliefs attached to metallurgy and their metamorphosis into the esoteric fundaments of the Bronze Age religions.

The history of reindeer domestication is a critical topic in the study of human-animal relationships across Northern Eurasia. The Iamal-Nenets region of Arctic Siberia, now a global centre of reindeer pastoralism, has been the subject of much recent research on reindeer domestication. However, tracking the beginnings of reindeer domestication in this region and elsewhere in Eurasia has proved challenging. Archaeological imagery is an under-utilized source of information for exploring animal domestication. In this paper we explore the abundant reindeer imagery found at the Iron Age site of Ust’-Polui in Iamal, dating from ~260 bce to ce 140. While reindeer were hunted in Siberia long before the occupation of Ust’-Polui, portable reindeer imagery appears abruptly at this time period, co-occurring at the site with equipment thought to be for training transport reindeer. Training and working with transport reindeer required long-term engagement with specific animals that became well known and precious to their human keepers. Creating, utilizing and depositing the reindeer imagery objects at Ust’-Polui was a way of acknowledging critical new working relationships with specific domestic reindeer.

The influence of pareidolia has often been anecdotally observed in examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, where topographic features of cave walls were incorporated into images. As part of a wider investigation into the visual psychology of the earliest known art, we explored three hypotheses relating to pareidolia in cases of Late Upper Palaeolithic art in Las Monedas and La Pasiega Caves (Cantabria, Spain). Deploying current research methods from visual psychology, our results support the notion that topography of cave walls played a strong role in the placement of figurative images—indicative of pareidolia influencing art making—although played a lesser role in determining whether the resulting images were relatively simple or complex. Our results also suggested that lighting conditions played little or no role in determining the form or placement of images, contrary to what has been previously assumed. We hypothesize that three ways of artist–cave interaction (‘conversations’) were at work in our sample caves and suggest a developmental scheme for these. We propose that these ‘conversations’ with caves and their surfaces may have broader implications for how we conceive of the emergence and development of art in the Palaeolithic.

Individuals with ‘extraordinary’ or ‘different’ minds have been suggested to be central to invention and the spread of new ideas in prehistory, shaping modern human behaviour and conferring an evolutionary advantage at population level. In this article the potential for neuropsychiatric conditions such as autistic spectrum disorders to provide this difference is explored, and the ability of the archaeological record to provide evidence of human behaviour is discussed. Specific reference is made to recent advances in the genetics of these conditions, which suggest that neuropsychiatric disorders represent a non-advantageous, pathological extreme of the human mind and are likely a by-product rather than a cause of human cognitive evolution.

This paper focuses on ideas of body construction in the Phoenician-Punic western Mediterranean. I concentrate on the study of ‘bottle-shaped’ terracottas and examine their connections with anthropomorphized and zoomorphic jugs and the bottle-shaped idol, a symbol engraved on the stelae of tophets. Exploring the Phoenician-Punic isomorphism between jugs, figurines and bodies introduces us to the study of the creation of a specific body world in terms of fluids: a world in which bodies were perceived as containers of liquids. I argue that this way of defining bodies is materialized in the figurines in two ways: first, via the transformation of the body into a bottle-shaped form, and second, via the emphasis on representing mouths, noses, breasts or genitalia, all parts of the body through which fluids circulate. I also examine the social and ritual contexts of the figurines and discuss issues of personhood and relational identities.

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.