Prevalent as bird imagery is in the ritual traditions of eastern North America, the bony remains of birds are relatively sparse in archaeological deposits and when present are typically viewed as subsistence remains. A first-millennium ad civic-ceremonial centre on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida contains large pits with bird bones amid abundant fish bone and other taxa. The avian remains are dominated by elements of juvenile white ibises, birds that were taken from offshore rookeries at the time of summer solstices. The pits into which they were deposited were emplaced on a relict dune with solstice orientations. The timing and siting of solstice feasts at this particular centre invites discussion of world-renewal rituality and the significance of birds in not only the timing of these events but also possibly as agents of balance and rejuvenation.

Miniature human figurines have inspired many theoretical advances in archaeological literature, centred around universal human reactions to the material affect of their form. However, confirmation that ancient audiences had such reactions to figurines can be difficult to access in the archaeological record. Egyptian shabtis, a type of funerary figurine, allow such reactions to be accessed by the archaeologist due to their widespread use throughout a long period of Egyptian history and their continuing popularity in other cultures since ancient times: evidence consists of a broad range of textual, artistic and archaeological data from many different cultures over a period of roughly 4000 years. This evidence confirms not only that ancient Egyptian craftsmen responded to and sought to maximize the material affect of the shabtis, but that a significant part of the human response to miniature human figurines is indeed conditioned by their material qualities, independent of the figurines’ original religious function and the cultural background of the viewer.

The type–token distinction and the notion of ‘tokenization’ are proposed as analytical tools that may help us understand better the emergence of numbers and mathematical thinking from the non-mathematical cultural practices of the Upper Palaeolithic such as painting, decorating portable objects, or making ornaments from beads, as described in recent studies in cognitive archaeology. While the type–token distinction has been a salient element in recent debates in the philosophy of mathematics, it seems not yet to have been registered in those areas of cognitive archaeology concerned with numbers—and yet it may help to identify the circumstances under which the conceptual potential of cultural artefacts develops. The concept of tokenization permits us to identify a plausible link between non-numerical cultural resources and the emergence of numerical thought patterns. This approach offers a way of appreciating the role of artefacts without raising the notoriously difficult question of their original ‘meaning’.

Our research at the large LBK settlement site of Vráble, southwest Slovakia, revealed dynamics of social integration and antagonisms unfolding in an agglomerated, early farming community. During its lifespan from 5250 to 4950 bc, it constantly grew until around 5050 bc it was inhabited by about 70 contemporaneous longhouses. We found that Vráble consisted of markedly autonomous farmstead units that were held together by village-wide social institutions including sharing and communality. Nevertheless, from the beginning, a contradiction between particular farmstead and collective village and neighbourhood interests existed and rose. Towards the end of the village's existence, around 5075 bc an elaborate enclosure was constructed around one of the three neigbourhoods, actively blocking contact with the others. Along this enclosure, human bodies were deposited, showing a social categorization that we interpret as relating to social inequality. This rising level of conflict and emerging social inequality was, we argue, not sustainable under the conditions of early farming societies and led to the village's abandonment at 4950 bc.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that complex structures in the natural and cultural worlds emerge from two types of design. Bottom-up design involves the rote action of a simple algorithm in an environment constrained by physical laws. Top-down design involves deliberation and planning, and is unique to modern humans. Identifying the emergence of top-down design in the hominin lineage is an important research challenge, and the archaeological record of stone technology is our best evidence for it. A current view is that artefact types and flaking methods increased in complexity from 3.3 to c. 0.3 million years ago, reflecting improving capacities at spatial cognition and working memory, culminating in top-down design perhaps as early as 1.75 million years ago. Recent experimental work, however, has shown that a simple ‘remove flake’ algorithm constrained by the laws of fracture mechanics—a form of bottom-up design—can produce stone tool attributes thought to be evidence of top-down design. Here, these models are reviewed and critiqued in light of the new experimental evidence. A revised working memory-based model, focusing on the recursive aspects of stone flaking, is proposed.

This paper explores the complex story of a particular style of rock art in western Arnhem Land known as ‘Painted Hands’. Using new evidence from recent fieldwork, we present a definition for their style, distribution and place in the stylistic chronologies of this region. We argue these motifs played an important cultural role in Aboriginal society during the period of European settlement in the region. We explore the complex messages embedded in the design features of the Painted Hands, arguing that they are more than simply hand stencils or markers of individuality. We suggest that these figures represent stylized and intensely encoded motifs with the power to communicate a high level of personal, clan and ceremonial identity at a time when all aspects of Aboriginal cultural identity were under threat.

This article explores the archaeology of place and memory from the standpoint of research on large cemeteries of chamber tombs cut out of the rock in southern Sicily. Burials of this kind were integral to the configuration of major settlements dating from the Early Bronze Age to the Iron Age (c. 2200–600 bc) and are a distinctive feature of Sicilian cultural landscapes. Rock-cut tombs at the four key sites of Castelluccio, Thapsos, Pantalica and Cassibile, representing successive phases of the Bronze and Iron Ages, are discussed in relation to terrain and layout. One aim is to identify recurrent principles of spatial organization, while drawing attention to settlements as structured environments with complex ritual geographies. Changes in tomb form are discussed with reference to variations in funerary practices over time. I conclude that cultural traditions in this region were sustained in part by the prominence of funerary architecture and by re-engagement with older sites in later periods through acts of re-use and remembrance.

Archaeologists evince a strong tendency to impute significance to the material traces they study, a propensity that has been especially marked since the post-processual emphasis on meaning and that has taken on renewed vigour with the turn to materiality. But are there not situations in which things are rather incidental or insignificant? This set of essays emerged from a workshop held in Berlin in April 2018, in which a group of scholars was invited to discuss the place of the incidental in social life in general and in archaeology in particular. Rather than lengthy formal papers, we offer an introduction that presents a general set of reflections on the issue of the incidentalness of things, followed by essays that pursue particular directions raised by that introduction as well as our discussions in Berlin. It is our hope that these brief forays into a complex topic will stimulate further work on this subject.

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.

This article discusses a problem in integrating archaeology and philology. For most of the twentieth century, archaeologists associated the spread of the Celtic languages with the supposed westward spread of the ‘eastern Hallstatt culture’ in the first millennium bc. More recently, some have discarded ‘Celtic from the East’ in favour of ‘Celtic from the West’, according to which Celtic was a much older lingua franca which evolved from a hypothetical Neolithic Proto-Indo-European language in the Atlantic zone and then spread eastwards in the third millennium bc. This article (1) criticizes the assumptions and misinterpretations of classical texts and onomastics that led to ‘Celtic from the East’ in the first place; (2) notes the unreliability of the linguistic evidence for ‘Celtic from the West’, namely (i) ‘glottochronology’ (which assumes that languages change at a steady rate), (ii) misunderstood place-name distribution maps and (iii) the undeciphered inscriptions in southwest Iberia; and (3) proposes that Celtic radiating from France during the first millennium bc would be a more economical explanation of the known facts.

The physical nature of cave walls and its impact on Upper Palaeolithic image making and viewing has frequently been invoked in explanations about the function of cave art. The morphological features (convexities, concavities, cracks and ridges) are frequently incorporated into the representations of prey animals that dominate the art, and several studies have attempted to document the relationship between the cave wall and the art in a quantitative manner. One of the effects of such incorporation is that undulating walls will distort the appearance of images as viewers change their viewing position. Was this distortion deliberate or accidental? Until now, the phenomenon has not been investigated quantitatively. We address this here, analysing 54 Late Upper Palaeolithic animal images deriving from three Cantabrian caves, Covalanas, El Pendo and El Castillo. We introduce a novel use for photogrammetry and 3D modelling through documenting the morphology of these caves’ walls and establishing the specific relationship between the walls and the art created on them. Our observations suggest that Palaeolithic artists deliberately placed images on very specific topographies. The restricted nature of these choice decisions and the fact that the resulting distortions could have been avoided but were not suggest that the interaction between viewer, art and wall was integral to the way cave art functioned.

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’.

Investigating how different forms of inequality arose and were sustained through time is key to understanding the emergence of complex social systems. Due to its long-term perspective, archaeology has much to contribute to this discussion. However, comparing inequality in different societies through time, especially in prehistory, is difficult because comparable metrics of value are not available. Here we use a recently developed technique which assumes a correlation between household size and household wealth to investigate inequality in the ancient Near East. If this assumption is correct, our results show that inequality increased from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, and we link this increase to changing forms of social and political organization. We see a step change in levels of inequality around the time of the emergence of urban sites at the beginning of the Bronze Age. However, urban and rural sites were similarly unequal, suggesting that outside the elite, the inhabitants of each encompassed a similar range of wealth levels. The situation changes during the Iron Age, when inequality in urban environments increases and rural sites become more equal.

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

There are some obvious differences between an archaeological and a historiographical approach to things. Put crudely, archaeologists study material ‘things’ while historians study texts. If historians are confronted with things, it is usually through descriptions of them (texts)—thus through the medium of the written word. In the introduction to this issue, the authors propose that the concept of Beiläufigkeit can help us ‘to discuss the conditions and processes that are responsible for the variable status of things in a world of objects’. They also propose that a way of approaching the subject is by studying things ‘that were made to be incidental’. One way of applying this to historical scholarship is to look at the way things appear—and disappear—in the historiographical narrative. If Beiläufigkeit is a fundamental phenomenon of socialization, as they suggest, then it is also a consequence of historical learning: we are taught when things are historically relevant and when they are not. It seems important to question this, especially if we think of historiography as part of a larger discourse that stabilizes and perpetuates hegemonic narratives—such as the narrative of the emergence of the modern West.

The site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey keeps fascinating archaeologists as it is being exposed. The excavation since 1995 has been accompanied by a lively discussion about the meaning and implications of its remarkable early Neolithic megalithic architecture, unprecedented in its monumentality, complexity and symbolic content. The building history and the chronological relations between the different structures (enclosures), however, remain in many ways a challenge and open to further analysis. The study presented here is an attempt to contribute in this direction by applying a preliminary architectural formal analysis in order to reconstruct aspects of the architectural design processes involved in the construction of the monumental enclosures. This is done under the premise that such investigation would shed light on the chaîne opératoire of the enclosures' construction and their history, thus enabling a fresh look as well as an evaluation of past suggestions regarding these structures and the people who built them. Indeed, the results of the analysis brought to light an underlying geometric pattern which offers a new understanding of the assemblage of architectural remains indicating that three of the stone-built large enclosures were planned and initially built as a single project.

One of my favourite photos of my son is him as an over-tired, dishevelled and very disgruntled five-year-old. He stands, holding out two globs of unidentifiable rusted metal, and looks at the camera (at me), with an accusing, penetrating glare (Fig. 1). As a distracted, overextended parent trying to run an archaeological field project (the Rising Sun Hotel in New Orleans), I had sent him to play in the dirt—the back dirt of our discard pile. I thought that's where he couldn't get into any trouble. I didn't imagine that it would get me into trouble. He was mad because we had overlooked these obvious artefacts (he had already grasped the subtle nature/culture distinction of the archaeological sorting process). We had disregarded them. We had attempted to make them unworthy of notice. What my son, in his innocence, was enunciating is the intentionality of ignoring something—and with intentionality, there is always a potential politics. That is what I would like to focus on here: how can we approach Beiläufigkeit—the incidental and taken-for-granted—as indexical of politics?