Can archaeology make sense of art ‘after interpretation’? Post-human scholarship suggests that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with representation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an adequate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that we can by building on Eduardo Kohn's thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life's animating processes, is form-taking and form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process of emergence through which novel ‘reals’—including societies and selves—are produced. Extending Sahlins’ definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning—the making of relatives—and its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

This paper analyses recently discussed evidence of over-imitation in Acheulean biface construction. First, it evaluates the argument for over-imitation using the available archaeological and cognitive science evidence. Next, it applies the four major theories of over-imitation, (1) Copy and Correct (C&C), (2) Automatic Causal Encoding (ACE), (3) social affiliation and (4) normative theory, as potential explanations for Acheulean over-imitation. ACE theory is the most likely explanation for early biface over-imitation (before 500,000 years bp), with social affiliation becoming increasingly likely after that. Normative over-imitation probably did not occur until around 300,000 years bp, when both the necessary hominin cognitive capacities and social conditions were present. An important conclusion emerging from this analysis is that over-imitation requires an integration of social and technical intelligence. Thus, the origins of cognitive fluidity may date back to as early as a million years ago, well before material evidence of fluidity is present.

This article argues that artefact types and typologies are kinds of assemblages, presenting an explicitly relational interpretation of typology grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. In the process it evaluates recent approaches to typology, and the interpretations these typologies have supported, and compares these with approaches which emphasize materiality and experience. It then illustrates the benefit of drawing these two angles of analysis closer together within an approach grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. Throughout, the discussion revolves around British Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burials and types of artefacts commonly found within them. The core argument is that, if used appropriately, typologies are not constraints to the appreciation of distinctiveness, difference and relationality in the past, but can rather form an important tool in detecting those relations and making sense of different past ways of becoming.

The study of non-hierarchical forms of social organization occupies a prominent place in the European Iron Age research. This paper explores the application of Pierre Clastres political anthropology to the study of the Iron Age. The approach of this study to the Iron Age focuses on the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. It was an area that experienced social changes from 1000 bc to the first century bc–first century ad, from the Bronze Age to the Roman conquest. Using the archaeological record of the northwest Iberian peninsula as a case study, the paper tries to show the potential benefits of applying Clastres’ ideas to the interpretation of European societies from the Iron Age: overcoming, thanks to the application of the concept of non-coercive power, the false and increasingly frequent image of non-hierarchical societies and introducing new ways of explaining social complexity that are not based on economic criteria.

In this article, I set out a relational approach to Andean art, with the aim of investigating, in broad terms, the making, viewing and experience of art among pre-Hispanic peoples. The analysis draws upon the ideas of art historians, as well as upon the work of ethnographers and archaeologists, to integrate theoretical approaches that consider animacy and the ways art objects gain significance as part of assemblages. Examining four aspects of Andean art: (1) insistence; (2) abstraction; (3) networks and linkages; and (4) affect and embodied experience, I conclude that the term ‘art’ (as an analytic category) overlaps poorly with Andean categories of cognition, sociality and material practice. Archaeologists can usefully refocus attention on the ways these craft items were made, used in daily life, displayed in rituals and ultimately deposited in the places where they were found.

Archaeologists have long debated the potential role of iconographic repertoires in reconstructing prehistoric ontologies and symbolic systems. The rich and complex imagery unearthed at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) has offered a promising ground to address this issue further. Previous interpretations have focused on the symbolic meaning of the depictions, often highlighting their male-centred and violent connotations, while overlooking the spatial and performative contexts of the depictions. This paper engages with this scholarly work in order to propose a new interpretation based on the anthropological framework of relational ontologies and on the analysis of some stylistic and contextual aspects of the iconography. Based on these premises, the curvilinear enclosures of Göbekli Tepe are interpreted as places of encounter devoted to interpersonal relationships among human and non-human agents, enabled by the intermediary role of images. The use of particular techniques of visual representation—including cues of motion and an emphasis on three-dimensionality—along with the centripetal orientation of the animal figures contributed to the animation of the depicted animals and to a sense of convergence of human and non-human beings in the social space of the enclosures.

In this paper, we examine a Terminal Formative-period (150 bc–ad 250) bundled offering from the site of Cerro de la Virgen, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The offering was emplaced below a prominent public building in the site's ceremonial centre and contained five stone objects, including a rain deity mask, a fragment of a second mask, a figurine of a deceased ancestor and two miniature table altars, as well as nine small ceramic vessels. Considered together as a ‘sacred bundle’, the stone objects collectively reference agricultural fertility, rulership and ancestor veneration, which we interpret to be a metaphorical invocation of a fundamental tenet of prehispanic Mesoamerican religious belief—the sacred covenant. The offering also played an active part in founding the community of Cerro de la Virgen, connecting its residents with the divine, the ancestors and the outside world and constituting differences in status among its members.

In this paper the notion of assemblage, as derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze, is explored in order to consider change in prehistory. An assemblage-based approach that draws on the concept of ‘vibrant matter’ is implemented as the means of understanding change. In this approach all materials are viewed as vibrant and in flux. These ideas are used to create a heterogeneous view of change where assemblages, or parts of assemblages, may change at varying speeds and rhythms and at many different scales. These ideas are explored through the case study of changing burial practices between 3000 and 1500 cal bc on the Isle of Man. I suggest that this kind of thinking allows us to study change differently, and explore the advantages of this approach for archaeology.

Archaeologies of colonialism have have called for exploring the culturally dynamic entanglements of people and objects while acknowledging the violence that accompanied these entanglements. Heeding these calls requires attention to how the state and state power were materialized, particularly in settler colonies where state apparatuses advanced unevenly, insidiously and clumsily. Here, I explore how the (mis)understandings and (mis)apprehensions of people and places that accompanied the halting expansion of colonial frontiers were materialized. Focusing on southern Africa's Highveld and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, I offer anxiety as a framework for conceiving of colonialisms as epistemic encounters: processes of ‘making sense’ of new people, things and places based on material practices, empirical experience and desire. Through a narrative of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg told with archival, archaeological and ethnographic materials, I revisit a longstanding trope of southern African archaeology and historiography: refugia from social distress. I argue that refuge can be taken as a sense-making practice rather than as reaction to stress. I close with thoughts on what an anxiety framework can offer the still-developing field of African historical archaeology.

The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the ‘great processes’ of change like the evolution of humanity, the colonization of the globe or the origins of agriculture, and focusing on the momentary, fleeting nature of a small-scale ethnographic present. Where archaeologists have attempted to integrate different scales the result has usually been to turn to Annales-influenced or time perspectivism-driven approaches and their fixed, linear and ontologically incompatible layers of history. In contrast, I will use assemblages to examine how we can rethink both the emergence of multiple scales and their role in history, without reducing the differences of the small-scale to an epiphenomenal outcome of larger events, or treating large-scale historical processes as mere reifications of the ‘real’ on-the-ground stuff of daily life. As we will see, this approach also has consequences for the particular kind of reality we accord to large-scale archaeological categories.

Carolyn Dean's essay of 2006, ‘The Trouble with (the Term) Art’, offers a provocative set of challenges to the very notion of archaeological art. This essay attempts to refocus some of Dean's questions and to answer them by exploring different lines of evidence, especially through the development of the art museum in the twentieth century. Finally, the author explores whether the twenty-first century observer can gain insight into the meanings of some ancient materials by consideration of their destruction.

We present the analysis of 29 human-transported limestone pebbles found during recent excavations (2009–11) in the Final Epigravettian levels at the Caverna delle Arene Candide, Italy. All pebbles are oblong, most bear traces of red ochre and many appear intentionally broken. Macroscopic analyses demonstrate morphological similarity with pebbles used as grave goods in the Final Epigravettian necropolis excavated at the site in the 1940s. Mediterranean beaches are the most plausible source for the pebbles, which were carefully selected for their specific shape. Microscopic observation of the pebbles’ surfaces shows traces of ochre located on the edges and/or centres of most pebbles. A breakage experiment suggests that many pebbles were broken with intentional, direct blows to their centre. We propose that these pebbles were used to apply ochre ritually to the individuals buried at the site, and that some were subsequently ritually ‘killed’. This study emphasizes the importance of studying artefacts that are often ignored due to their similarities to simple broken rocks. It also provides a method to study pebbles as a distinct artefact category, and shows that even broken parts should be studied to understand the story told by such objects in the context of prehistoric human social systems.

New evidence of ritual seclusion and sensory deprivation, from the eastern margins of the Namib Desert suggests that specialized shamans may have operated alone, and possibly as itinerants, performing ritual services at widely scattered sites. This behaviour has its origins in hunter-gatherer responses to the introduction of pastoralism, and to the emergence of specialist rainmakers and healers during the second millennium ad. The research reported here identifies and explains important anomalies in the rock art and archaeology of hunter-gatherer religious practice in southern Africa.

For well over a century, archaeology has been animated by the construction—and, increasingly, the critique—of grand narratives surveying the evolution of politics, economics, technologies, religion and so on. Deep histories of ‘art’ have not been pursued with comparable energy. This essay explores why this is so, and it considers what might be gained from extending the distinctively archaeological approach to human history to include analyses of long-term shifts in the organization and functions of images. In doing so, it proposes that notions of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ drawn from art-historical conversations might profitably be redeployed to examine deeper cross-cultural patterns.

The religious temperature of post-Reformation early modern England was constantly over-heating. Given that Protestant belief was frequently challenged by residual dissent, religious identity of whatever kind was crucial to both individual and parochial cosmological understanding. Hence, the many spatial, sensory, material and performative changes which were visited on parish churches over this period were designed to shape and redirect belief, but could also act to confuse believers. In order to penetrate this mass of religious reaction and response, I employ Assemblage Theory, particularly that of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, whose thinking is currently strongly influential amongst archaeologists. Using her work on the vitality of matter and the importance of the assemblage as a phenomenon containing material, non-material and human components, I apply a selection of her ideas to diagnostic elements of being and belief visible in the religious activities and materiality of the early modern parish church. While I refrain from discussing particular human individuals or groups, my chosen examples are intended to foreground the ontology of early modern parishioners, their perception of their hierarchical status within Anglican cosmology, their territorial conceptions of religious space and the workings of time as seen through the sequential assemblages of monumental tombs. Following Bennett, but departing from the current archaeological concentration on the primacy of materiality, this essay is designed to plug some of the people-shaped holes which are sometimes left unfilled by their surrounding material networks.

Fragments of possible fired clay found at Boncuklu Höyük, central Turkey, appear to derive from rudimentary vessels, despite the later ninth- and early eighth-millennium cal. bc and thus ‘Aceramic’ dates for the site. This paper will examine the evidence for such fired clay vessels at Boncuklu and consider their implications as examples of some of the earliest pottery in Anatolia. The discussion will examine contextual evidence for the role of these fragments and consider their relative rarity at the site and the implications for the marked widespread adoption of pottery in southwest Asia c. 7000–6700 cal. bc.

New discoveries from a Californian cave have found a remarkable assemblage of cached perishable and other artefacts. Comprised of baskets, cordage, bone, antler, leather, food residues and other materials, the assemblages are dispersed through four caves in the largest ever cache discovered in the borderland region attributable to the native Californian linguistic group known as the Chumash. This paper develops a methodology based upon DeLanda's philosophy of assemblages and Graeber's anthropological theory of value. Importantly, following Normark, it is argue that assemblage theory needs to be operationalized into a methodological approach in order to apply it archaeologically. This methodology illustrate how a capacity analysis of the Cache Cave assemblage relates to values within the society which cached it by revealing the relational capacities within assemblages and relative capacities between them. Importantly, as a scalable approach, capacity analysis allows the investigation of the heterogeneous dynamics within complex societies.

This project sees archaeology and art as a political tool for disrupting conventional, politically loaded narratives of the past. Rather than producing institutionally safe narratives conventionally certified as truth, archaeologists should follow the lead of artists who use the past as a source of materials to be reconfigured in new ways to help people see in new ways. Using as an example the works of the Canadian artist Ken Monkman, who subverts nineteenth- century landscape painting to reinsert the missing critiques of Anglo-American colonialism, dominance of nature, and heteronormativity, this paper advocates disarticulating materials from the past by severing them from their context, repurposing them to bring contemporary concerns to the fore and creating new, disruptive visions from them. The article proposes the practice of an art/archaeology.

In this article I review arguments in favour of the need and possibility of importing a revitalized concept of art in archaeological reasoning. By comprehending the concept of art as a function, rather than as a property inherent within particular kinds of objects or events, I offer a way of understanding art as the mode in which a phenomenon operates when its ontological multiplicity, its variety of equally real modes of being, becomes exposed. Seen in this vein, art emerges as an entity both created and experienced when several potential versions of a thing or event are laid bare. I emphasize that an element's capacity to communicate such factual intersectionality requires effort in order to endure; and argue that it is the formats for such ‘practices of maintenance’ that constitute art-worlds situated in culture. I also assert that these strategies, like all formalized engagements with material culture, generate traces, and accordingly can be grasped by analyses of an archaeological record. To illustrate this idea, I discuss the red ochre rock paintings from Neolithic northern Sweden made between approximately 6000 and 4000 bp by hunter-gatherer communities that were also producing petroglyphs.