Collective tombs are a characteristic feature of Neolithic societies of Western Europe. Some recent studies have suggested that they originated from an earlier tradition of individual burials at the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. The concept of collective burial involving movement and manipulation of bodies and body parts is, however, entirely different. The former tries to preserve the integrity of the bodies and does not acknowledge the stages of metamorphosis of the corpse. The latter by contrast involves observation and assistance in the dissolution of the body. Recent discoveries of Early Mesolithic collective tombs in southern Belgium have underlined the fact that collective burials are far from restricted to Neolithic contexts in Western Europe. They themselves, however, are not merely a potential point of origin for Middle and Late Neolithic collective tombs but form part of a long-standing tradition reaching back into the Upper Palaeolithic.

In recent years there has been a major growth of interest in exploring the analogies between the genetic transmission of information from one generation to the next and the processes of cultural transmission, in an attempt to obtain a greater understanding of how culture change occurs. This article uses computer simulation to explore the implications of a specific model of the relationship between demography and innovation within an evolutionary framework. The consequences of innovation appear far more successful in larger populations than in smaller ones. In conclusion, it is suggested that the model has major implications for the origins of modern human culture in the last 50,000 years, which may be seen not as the result of genetic mutations leading to improved cognitive capacities of individuals, but as a population consequence of the demographic growth and increased contact range which are evident at this time. It is also proposed that the model may be of general relevance for understanding the process of cultural evolution in modern and pre-modern humans.

It has been postulated that one difference between Neanderthals and anatomically modern people lies in a ‘clearer mental template’ of flaked stone tools on the part of modern people. This is thought to have been manifested in greater tool standardization during the Upper Palaeolithic than in the Middle Palaeolithic. Testing of this hypothesis, using three samples of a characteristic Upper Palaeolithic tool class — burins — from one Middle Palaeolithic and two Upper Palaeolithic assemblages, reveals that they are equally standardized for both metric and non-metric traits. Further consideration suggests that most Palaeolithic flaked stone tools are poorly suited to test notions of standardization, although some tool attributes may be well suited when considered in specific adaptive contexts.

This article investigates the degree and nature of ‘imposed form’ in Middle Palaeolithic scrapers, the most common category of stone tool produced by Neanderthals. Novice flintknappers unfamiliar with Middle Palaeolithic tool forms were found to consistently employ two rules in manufacturing scrapers: the striking platform and any adjacent blunt edges were left intact to facilitate prehension, and the longest edge with the most acute spine-plane angle was retouched. Scrapers from three major Middle Palaeolithic sites adhered to these rules in over 90 per cent of cases, but significant divergence from these rules was found in a sample from Skhul cave (Israel) level B1, associated with early anatomically modern Homo sapiens. It is concluded that Middle Palaeolithic scraper manufacture was structured by the need to create a suitable working edge, and to locate that edge to maximize ease and comfort during manufacture and use. The overall shape of the resulting tools was thus not an expression of ‘imposed form’ in the conventional sense. The discovery of violations of these rules in the Skhul B1 collection provides evidence of increased use of imposed form, as well as potentially significant behavioural differences between early anatomically modern Homo sapiens and contemporary Neanderthals.

Megalithic art has often been treated as a unitary phenomenon, related to the spread of farming across Western Europe. This approach does not do justice to the very different ways in which tomb decoration was employed by particular communities. This article focuses on the megalithic art of Orkney, much of it recorded for the first time during a recent field survey. This is normally interpreted as a local variant of the style of ‘art’ found in Neolithic Ireland, but on close examination it has much stronger links with the abstract motifs found in local settlements. Whereas the megalithic art of Ireland may have celebrated the passage of the dead to another world, in Orkney it was used to emphasize their continued involvement in the affairs of the living.

Monumental sanctuaries in Central Italy, more specifically South Etruria, appear suddenly in the middle of the first millennium bc. Ancient Greek and Roman authors wrote about the Etruscans, and the Etruscans themselves produced a mass of material evidence which they buried in their tombs, and which drew on Classical elements including mythology. As a result of the wealth and breadth of archaeological material, this society provides much, so far unexplored, scope for cognitive investigation. Here my concern is why sanctuaries emerged in the late sixth century, and why the highly codified temple architecture of South Etruria took the form that it did.

The changing cosmological symbolism incorporated in Phases 1 and 2 at Stonehenge is reviewed in the light of new evidence from patterns of deposition prior to the construction of the bluestone and sarsen stone settings. The early structure of the monument and attendant depositional practices embodied a scheme of radial division, including a symbolic quartering primarily demarcated by solstitial rising and setting points. Through sustained ritual practice, however, the motions of the moon came increasingly to be referenced through deposition, particularly of cremations. This evidence seems to contradict earlier claims of a sudden shift in and around Wessex during the mid-third millennium BC from a predominantly lunar to a predominantly solar cosmology. It suggests instead that interest in solar and lunar events did not necessarily preclude each other and that over the centuries there was a process of subtle change involving the continual reworking of symbolic schemes emphasizing a sense of ‘timelessness’ and the unchanging order of the universe.

Storage of symbolic information outside the human brain is accepted here as the first undisputed evidence for cultural modernity. In the hunter-gatherer context of the Stone Age this storage could include artwork, rapidly changing artefact styles and organized spatial layout of campsites. Modern human behaviour in this context is distinguished by a symbolic use of space and material culture to define social relationships, including significant groupings based on attributes such as kinship, gender, age or skill. Symbolism maintains, negotiates, legitimizes and transmits such relationships. It is argued here that artefacts are not inherently imbued with symbolism and that modern human culture cannot be automatically inferred from inventories of archaeologically recovered material culture. Evidence for the out-of-brain storage of symbolism in southern African sites first appears in the final phase of the Middle Stone Age at about 40,000 years ago.

The Narmer Palette occupies a key position in our understanding of the transition from Predynastic to Dynastic culture in Egypt. Previous interpretations have focused largely upon correspondences between its decorative content and later conventions of élite display. Here, the decoration of the palette is instead related to its form and functional attributes and their derivation from the Neolithic cultures of the Nile Valley, which are contrasted with those of southwest Asia and Europe. It is argued that the widespread adoption of a pastoral lifestyle during the fifth millennium BC was associated with new modes of bodily display and ritual, into which cattle and other animals were incorporated. These constituted an archive of cultural forms and practices which the makers of the Narmer Palette, and other Protodynastic monuments, drew from and transformed. Taking cattle as a focus, the article begins with a consideration of interpretative problems relating to animal art and ritual in archaeology, and stresses the value of perspectives derived from the anthropology of pastoral societies.

Normative discontinuity is little studied by archaeologists although its importance for understanding diachronic phenomena like social stratification is obvious. Cognitive research provides the ground for a Weberian theory of normative change as the outcome of contestations between competing social myths. These conflicts arise from incongruities between metaphorically-structured conceptualizations of social reality and experienced social reality. To facilitate the archaeological inference of normative change, a typology of generative rules is suggested by which normative concepts might be expressed as substantive metaphors. The methodology is applied to a pilot study of temporal covariation in pottery design imagery within three major ceramic traditions of late Nuragic Sardinia. When ‘read’ as substantive metaphorical expressions of past social experiences, late Nuragic ceramic imagery suggests a coherent set of normative concepts ‘structured’ in terms of a central ontological metaphor of the general ‘vessel-as-social-landscape’ type. Moreover, variations in that material imagery make sense in terms of normative changes conducive to the emergence of class relations.

When, almost a century ago, Raphael Pumpelly put forward the ‘oasis theory’ for the origins of farming in the Near East, his was one of the first in a long series of explanations which looked to environment and ecology as the cause of the shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation and animal husbandry. Pumpelly envisaged climatic desiccation at the end of the last Ice Age as the primary factor, forcing humans, plants and animals into ever closer proximity as the arid zones expanded around them. Subsequent fieldworkers took the closer investigation of environmental changes as a key aim of their research, both in the Near East and elsewhere, and this has remained a fundamental theme in theories for the emergence of agriculture. More recent advances in our understanding of environmental change have placed particular emphasis on the cold Younger Dryas episode, at the end of the last Ice Age. The impact of this sudden reversal of climate warming on the complex Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Levant may, it is argued, have forced or encouraged these communities to explore novel subsistence modes.

Not everybody accepts such a chain of reasoning, however, and in The Birth of Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin rejects this emphasis on ecology and environment as the cause of change. Instead, he argues that primacy should be accorded to a restructuring of human mentality from the thirteenth to the tenth millennium BC, expressed in terms of new religious ideas and symbols. Cauvin's book, originally published in French in 1994 under the title Naissance des divinités, naissance de l'agriculture, adopts an ideological approach to explaining the Neolithic which is at odds with many traditional understandings, but which resonates closely with the idea that the Neolithic is much more than an economic transition, and coincided with a transformation in the world view of the prehistoric societies concerned. The present English translation appeared in 2000, and is based on the second French edition (1997) with the addition of a postscript summarizing relevant discoveries made since that date.

Owing to illness, Jacques Cauvin has been unable to contribute to this Review Feature as had been hoped, but we are fortunate that his translator, Trevor Watkins, has agreed to draft a response to the comments made by our invited reviewers. These include Ian Hodder, whose own work on the Neolithic transition has been influenced by Cauvin's research, and Ofer Bar-Yosef and Gary Rollefson, both specialists in the prehistory of the Levant. At Dr Watkins' suggestion, the introductory piece which opens the Review Feature is a translated extract from Jacques Cauvin's contribution to a similar review treatment in Les Nouvelles de l'Archéologie (No. 79, 2000, 49–53). As our reviewers make clear, the significance of the book, and the debate which it has initiated, will make it akey text for many years to come.

A recently discovered painted pottery vessel from the Predynastic cemetery of Umm el-Qaab in Abydos, Egypt (early fourth millennium bc), bears one of the most sophisticated proto-historic scenes surviving from the ancient Near East. The excavators interpreted the scene as a depiction of warfare. A systematic analysis of its various components, however, as well as two similar contemporary scenes, suggests that the scene depicts dancing. It is even possible that the scene represents four stages in a sequence of movement. If so, it is one of the earliest movement notation documents preserved from antiquity.

A core question of cognitive archaeology is the evolution of modern thinking. In this article, it is argued that a cluster of specific cognitive abilities, ‘executive functions’, was one of the key evolutionary acquisitions that led to the development of modern thinking. A review of the history of executive functions is presented as well as current opinions as to their nature and genetic basis. Examples are also presented from the cognitive archaeological record that may be representative of executive functions in the evolution of modern thought.