Over the last two decades, there has been increasing attention to community archaeology, an archaeology which acknowledges the impact of archaeological research upon the communities among which it is conducted. Doing fieldwork has tangible effects upon the people we work among: archaeologists provide employment, spend money locally, negotiate local power structures, provide exotic connections, and, not least, change the landscape of knowledge by helping local people understand more or different things about their ancestors and about their own historical identity. While this is true worldwide, within American Historical Archaeology this strand of research has converged with a tradition of sophisticated materialist analysis highlighting not only class domination but also resistance and the persistence of alternative practices, ideologies and identities. A key element of this archaeology is public participation in the process of revealing a past of domination, struggle and resistance. The result is an archaeology which aspires not only to revise traditionally endorsed accounts of American history, but also to be an activist archaeology.

Mark Leone began this line of activist, participatory historical archaeology many years ago in Annapolis, and many of the scholars currently contributing to this body of work have been trained or inspired by this project. In The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital, Leone summarizes twenty-five years of research at Annapolis.

The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis has received the Society for Historical Archaeology's James Deetz Book Award for 2008.

The abundance of obsidian at the Pottery Neolithic Wadi Rabah culture (7600/500–6800 cal. bp) settlement of Hagoshrim IV in northern Israel, the rich repertoire of stamp seals, and imported chlorite vessels at the site, as well as the presence of skilled obsidian knappers, indicate intensive trade. Reviewing the archaeological data, we propose that the obsidian discovered at Hagoshrim IV and at other Wadi Rabah sites of the southern Levant reflects one of the earliest forms of a kin-based direct trade. Kin-based direct trade partnerships revolve around the migration of family members from the source area of the goods to areas in which the goods are highly valued to form trading communities and act as agents to receive them. We further propose that Hagoshrim acted as a possible trading community, interacting with the Wadi Rabah settlements of northern Israel and that the transition in the source of the obsidian from mainly central Anatolian sources (in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period) to mainly Eastern Anatolian sources (in the Pottery Neolithic period) is connected with changes occurring at the source areas of the obsidian, possibly the rise of the Halaf cultural complex in the northern Levant c. 7900 cal. bp. All these indicate that the Wadi Rabah culture was well integrated in the expanding interaction sphere of the Middle and Late Halafian.

Handaxes have a uniquely prominent role in the history of Palaeolithic archaeology, and their early study provides crucial information concerning the epistemology of the field. We have little conclusive evidence, however, of their investigation or societal value prior to the mid seventeenth century. Here we investigate the shape, colour and potential flake scarring on a handaxe-like stone object seen in the Melun Diptych, painted by the French fifteenth-century artist Jean Fouquet, and compare its features with artefacts from diverse (including French) Acheulean handaxe assemblages. Commissioned by a high-status individual, Étienne Chevalier, Fouquet's work (Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen) depicts an important religious context, while the handaxe-like object points to the stoning to death of an important Christian saint. Our results strongly support the interpretation that the painted stone object represents a flint Acheulean handaxe, likely sourced from northern France, where Fouquet lived. Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world.

Archaeology is centrally concerned with the tension between material remains in the present and a reconstructed past. This tension is captured by the concept of a trace, namely a contemporary phenomenon that references the past through some sort of epistemic intervention. Traces are deceptively complex in terms of both their epistemology and their ontology and hence worthy of detailed exploration. In particular, archaeological traces not only concern the past per se but also possess a latent quality of as yet unrealized signification. This gives archaeological traces a future orientation that is rarely considered in discussions of archaeological epistemology.

The first millennium bc brought warfare to the interior of Egypt on a significant scale. We have two vivid records, one written and the other pictorial. The former is a first-person narrative of the Napatan (Sudanese) king Piankhy who, having gained control of the south of Egypt, embarked in 730 bc on a methodical subjugation of the rest of the country, then under the rule of several local families. During the seemingly irresistible northward progress of his army Piankhy makes frequent reference to walls with battlements and gates which could be countered with siege towers/battering rams and the erection of earthen ramps, although Piankhy himself preferred the tactic of direct storming. Within the circuit of these walls lay treasuries and granaries and, in the case of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, the palace of the local king Nemlut together with its stables for horses.

Swan images (Cygnus sp.) are the most common symbols at petroglyph sites on the eastern shore of Lake Onega, northwest Russia, where rock engraving most likely occurred around the mid-Neolithic period. At some sites they constitute over 60 per cent of all glyphs and they are the only glyph type common to all sites. The abundance of swan symbols at a given Onega site correlates most strongly with the abundance of cervids (mostly elk). There are even partially superimposed elk–swan engravings where part of one animal contributes to the other's body. There is evidence that, during the mid-Neolithic, early sites at Lake Onega were submerged by rising water levels, most probably coinciding with a period of climatic cooling. By that point, new petroglyph sites had been created further north by the Vodla river. Here swan images are larger and more abundant and other glyphs (such as solar/lunar) are absent. It is suggested that the swan was a supernatural symbol. Its prominence at the more recent Vodla sites may be indicative of greater importance being given to this species in the context of environmental change and an associated greater struggle for survival. Thus, the swan symbol may have been perceived by the local Neolithic Finno-Ugric people as an agent for the intended reversal or control of such external challenges, and selected from a pre-existing mythological framework based on its associated traits and perceived powers.

James C. Scott's Against the Grain has immense relevance for how archaeologists view the dynamics of early states and complex polities. In this volume, Scott—already established as a leading theorist of states and statecraft (e.g. Scott 1997; 2009)—brings his analytic power and capacity to turn a phrase to bear on the topic of the ‘earliest states’.

A unique gold finger ring, dated stylistically to c.ad 580–650, was discovered by metal-detecting in Essex in 2011. The ‘northwest Essex Anglo-Saxon ring’ is highly decorated with Style II art and shows a distinctive juxtaposition of ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ imagery including birds of prey and an anthropomorphic figure holding a long cross in the right hand, a raptor in the left. In this article, I consider the possibility that the object provides further evidence that falconry was practised in early Anglo-Saxon England. I begin by examining the finger ring itself and the imagery upon it, situating this within an Anglo-Saxon and broader Continental context. I then explore the possible social context of the ring, focusing on the ‘ideology of predation’ within which falconry, as a high-status hunting pursuit, may have been performed. Evaluating the hybrid ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ elements of the imagery, I suggest that falconry, and the ring itself as a high-status and possibly royal object, may have played important roles in the dynamics of pagan–Christian ‘discursive space’.

Last year saw the publication of two major studies on the evolution of the human mind, Human Evolution, Language and Mind by William Noble and Iain Davidson, and The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen. Both draw on a number of disciplines including archaeology, psychology, philosophy and animal ethology, but their resulting scenarios of human development differ in several important respects. The question of mind is central to our understanding of the origin of humanness. As Noble and Davidson put it, ‘the mark of modern human behaviour is its self-consciousness, its “mindedness”’. They trace the origin of this behaviour back no further than 100,000 years ago. In Noble and Davidson's view, the behaviours of the ancestors of humans were similar in crucial respects to those of modern non-human primates. Mithen, on the other hand, ‘cannot accept … that language did not appear in a gradual fashion’. Mithen proposes a series of distinct intelligences, and puts forward a modular theory of the evolution of the human mind. In the following pages we present the issues in the form of a debate, inviting each of the three authors to review each other's books and then offering them the opportunity to defend their alternative standpoints. We begin with Mithen's review of Noble and Davidson, then Noble and Davidson's review of Mithen, and finish with their respective replies to the comments and criticisms which have been raised.