The wealth of inscriptions at the Wadi Hammamat greywacke quarries (Egyptian Eastern Desert) have made it a key place to pursue enquiries about the social organization of expeditions to procure resources. Analysis of this textual material alone has, however, given us only a partial view of the social milieu that maintained quarrying from the fourth millennium bc to the fifth century ad. This article presents a fresh perspective on Egyptian quarrying that aims to balance the more accepted (and persistent) perceptions of overriding state control of these activities with viewpoints gained from recent archaeological survey of the Wadi Hammamat quarries. Practically and theoretically, a holistic approach is taken that contextualizes the textual sources and other elements of the archaeological record within the quarry landscape as a series of material complexes. Cross-cultural and comparative approaches to interpreting the data have enabled both reappraisal and augmentation of the ways in which we understand the social interplay between local and regional kin-groups within notions of state control of these activities. The article argues for the essential roles played by kinship ties and linkages to place, through the continual inscribing of names, as parts of the underlying human narrative that maintained quarrying here for generations.

The Bronze to Iron Age transition in Crete, a period of state collapse and insecurity, saw the island's rugged, high-contrast topography used in striking new ways. The visual drama of many of the new site locations has stimulated significant research over the last hundred years, with explanation of the change as the main focus. The new sites are not monumental in character: the vast majority are settlements, and much of the information about them comes from survey. Perhaps as a result, the new site map has not been much studied from phenomenological perspectives. A focus on the visual and experiential aspects of the new landscape can offer valuable insights into social structures at this period, and illuminate social developments prefiguring the emergence of polis states in Crete by c. 700 bc. To develop, share and evaluate this type of integrated study, digital reconstructive techniques are still under-used in this region. I highlight their potential value in addressing a regularly-identified shortcoming of phenomenological approaches — their necessarily subjective emphasis.

In ‘Humanist Missteps’, Matthew Greer makes the pointed observation that non-anthropocentric frameworks, including symmetrical, object-oriented and posthuman feminist archaeologies, have primarily focused on deconstructing the human–non-human binary while failing to problematize humanist assumptions about who counts as Human. At the core of Greer's argument is the matter of citational practice: which social theorists are archaeologists referencing in their efforts to craft relational approaches to humans, things, animals and plants? In answering this question, the author points to a notable lack of Black Studies theorists, particularly the work of Sylvia Wynter, Zakkiyah Jackson and Tiffany King, in posthumanist archaeologies. While I agree with Greer's critiques, his essay stops short of explaining this citational silence. In this brief commentary, I suggest that this absence of Black Studies scholarship reflects the fact that the discipline of archaeology remains a ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al. 2011: 545) and maintains an artificial division between analysis and activism.

The Mayak Chemical Combine was one of the most secretive places in the Soviet Union. It was built in the southern Urals, close to Kyshtym. The facility produced weapons-grade plutonium and other radioactive isotopes for the Soviet nuclear military programme. Fugitives from behind the Iron Curtain mentioned the site, usually due to accidents and peculiar, unexplained observations. Such reports were often treated in the West as exaggerated or fictional, as they spoke of large-scale disasters, deportations and vast landscape transformations. This paper aims to present the research potential of declassified Cold War intelligence records for archaeological landscape studies of off-limits military sites. To outline a somewhat broader perspective, I will combine those sources with contemporary historical knowledge and modern remote sensing data. The analysis will be focused on the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] satellite imagery (CORONA and GAMBIT) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. The discussed sources recorded outcomes of nuclear disasters, hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited wasteland, abandoned villages, disappearing lakes, dying forests, diverted rivers, and other features related to this clandestine plutonium facility.

Geoglyphs are widely seen as an expression of past sacred landscapes. In this article, I offer a new theoretical approach to geoglyphs, interpreting them as a distinctly anarchic and decentralized medium for ritual activity. When we define geoglyphs as large-scale images, and exclude other phenomena such as earthworks, it is clear that their occurrence is actually quite limited in space and time. Almost all known examples of geoglyphs are located in the Americas, and they are particularly associated with ‘middle-range’ societies, rather than states or empires. Geoglyphs produced by hunter-gatherer communities are also comparatively rare. I regard this pattern as a direct consequence of the anarchist affordances of the geoglyph medium. In agricultural societies where regional integration and incipient centralization were taking place (e.g. the ancient Nasca), geoglyphs provided a decentralizing counterbalance. I therefore theorize the incorporation of geoglyph-based ritual practices as a historically situated process of constitutional reform, whereby ancient peoples consciously sought to redistribute power and authority.

The processes leading to the formation of early state societies remain one of the key topics of archaeological research. Few of these early states are as famous or evocative as that of ancient Egypt, a land of dramatic monuments and terrain, with mysterious and exotic religious practices and a distinctive and exotic iconography. But was Egypt the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus alleged? In this new book, Toby Wilkinson draws attention to a relatively neglected part of the Egyptian landscape: not the fertile river valley, but the deserts which fringe it to east and west. It is here in the deserts, he argues, that the origins of the Egyptian state are to be found. In recent millennia, the deserts have been hostile environments of rock and sand. Go back before 3000 bc, however, and a rather different picture emerges. This different picture is of a desert hinterland peopled by nomadic groups who spent part of their year in the Nile valley. It suggests a more mobile view of Egyptian Predynastic society than has usually been supposed. Desert and valley may have functioned together in a classic pattern of complementarity between contrasting environmental zones, with cattle herds perhaps moved from valley floor to desert in step with the cyclical pattern of the seasons. The specific ingredient which Wilkinson uses to link valley and desert during the fourth millennium bc is rock art. Egyptian rock art has not yet been properly recognized as a rich and important repertoire by specialists in the burgeoning field of rock art as whole. Surveys over more than a century, however, have revealed numerous groups of pecked and engraved images on the desert cliffs and boulders, and recent expeditions (including those by Wilkinson himself) are continually adding to the corpus. The Egyptian desert rock art is generally less well-known than the vivid rock paintings of the central Sahara (such as the famous Tassili frescoes), though it too conveys the image of a greener more habitable landscape. Wilkinson ties specific motifs found in the desert rock art to iconography from the Nile valley during the fourth millennium and later. Yet the linkages and chronologies remain controversial, along with the central hypothesis. Did the desiccation of the savannas lead to the formation of the Egypt, forcing the scattered pastoralist populations to withdraw to a cultivated Nile valley? Was Egypt the gift of the deserts, not the Nile? In this Review Feature the hypothesis is examined by specialists working in Egypt and Nubia, and the reliability of the supporting evidence is assessed.

Much detail regarding the early development of stone architecture in Egypt remains unclear. Prevailing studies tend to focus on the contribution of religious and socio-economic factors, but the role of environmental elements should not be understated. For much of the First Dynasty, innovation in stone architecture was driven by developments in the private realm, a result of favourable geology in Lower Egypt. Meanwhile, multiple strands of evidence suggest that Egypt experienced wetter climatic conditions during the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom. This would have had major implications on both the production of mudbrick and the short-term durability of mudbrick structures. It is argued that these environmental factors played a key role in facilitating and accelerating the rise of stone architecture in Egypt.

Summing up the data deriving from the Natufian burials at Hayonim Cave which incorporates information pertaining to the last grave uncovered on site (Grave XVII), the paper endeavours to understand the role of burials within the evolving Natufian society at large. It seems that certain sites—Hayonim Cave being a case in point—served as special localities, used by a particular group as a burial ground all through the Natufian time-span (i.e. for more than 3000 years). Members of that group returned to the cave again and again in order to bury their dead, being aware of the location of the preceding graves, apparently retaining a long-term memory of their burial practices. At the same time, at least some burials provide evidence for inter-group ties, as evident through particular similarities between certain burials in two distinct Natufian sites, Hayonim Cave and Eynan (‘Ain Mallaha). Clearly, retention of mortuary practices played a significant role in consolidating and preserving social cohesion in the Natufian society.

This paper presents an experiment. Can a typologically inarticulate assemblage be accounted for by other means? What might such an articulation look like? What prospects would it offer? Focusing on three small late Pottery Neolithic assemblages from the southern Levant, the paper argues that they are typologically inarticulate, primarily because they possess considerable morphological fluidity that is at odds with the segmented structure demanded by this mode of classification. The paper presents an attempt to formulate an account of these assemblages that incorporates their morphological fluidity and ambiguity. Allowing for differential quantitative emphases across the assemblage, it is suggested that certain forms may be specified as types. In turn, the relations among these types are shown to constitute a structural order. Yet the assemblages are also fundamentally ambivalent, both constituting and de-constituting their order and logic. For the types are constituted in relative (rather than absolute) terms and the orderly structures are accompanied by elements that are incommensurable with it. Acknowledging these conflicting qualities, it is proposed that they are multiple, that the one assemblage is several. Finally, the paper explores some implications this understanding of the ceramic assemblages might have for the discussion of temporal development.

Architectural reuse was common in ancient Egypt. Modern interpretations of this practice, particularly in royal contexts, usually ascribe it either a practical or ideological function, only rarely considering it possible that different motivations were involved. This type of approach is particularly true for the reuse of Old Kingdom blocks by the Middle Kingdom king Amenemhat I in his pyramid at Lisht, a case often classified as solely utilitarian. However, an approach that prioritizes not only the ancient Egyptian worldview and royal ideology, but also how this case of reuse fits into cross-cultural considerations of monumentality, demonstrates the necessity to look at this practice more holistically. This study focuses in particular on the possibility that the transportation of reused materials by Amenemhat I was a spectacle of construction used to showcase the king's legitimacy and authority at the start of a new dynasty.

Greer offers an excellent primer on some Black Studies scholars’ critiques of humanism, for which he uses the label ‘counter-humanism’ after Erasmus (2020), distinguishing these approaches from ‘posthumanism.’ He identifies two primary strains of posthumanism relevant to archaeological interpretation, symmetrical archaeology and posthuman feminism, though examples of the latter are drawn from a broader body of academic literature and are subject to less critique. Posthumanists are shown to prioritize dismantling a human–object divide, while counter-humanists critique the human–non-human split. This may appear to be more or less the same project, but the framing of ‘A/not-A’ rather than ‘A–B’ emphasizes the hegemonic relationships between these categories, the continuity within, and makes more explicit the fact that people are included in both the non-human and object categories.

This paper investigates transformations in the construction and expression of gender ideologies in the Basin of Mexico from the late Middle Formative through Classic periods (approx. 800 bc–ad 600). Ceramic figurines from the sites of Teotihuacan, Axotlan, Cerro Portezuelo and Huixtoco are used to explore how elements of gender were constructed and communicated in the region over the course of a millennium, and how these practices underwent a transformation during the emergence and expansion of the Teotihuacan state. During the Formative periods, the selection, combination, or omission of sexual attributes in association with decorative elements such as jewellery formed a flexible strategy for depicting a variety of social identities across the Basin of Mexico. The emergence of the Teotihuacan figurine style in the Terminal Formative period brought with it significant changes to the way figurine bodies were formed—sexual attributes disappeared and were replaced with increasingly elaborate clothing and jewellery as the figurine corpus diversified into multiple types. Although relative rates of depictions of feminine and masculine figurines shifted over time, in no period were figurines limited to a binary set of depictions, indicating diverse social identities and gender ideologies in the Basin of Mexico over time.