This paper addresses the motivations for producing the rare object stencils found in the rock art of western Arnhem Land. We present evidence for 84 stencils recorded as part of the Mirarr Gunwarddebim project in western Arnhem Land, northern Australia. Ranging from boomerangs to dilly bags, armlets and spearthrowers, this assemblage suggests something other than a common or ongoing culture practice of stencilling objects used in everyday life. Instead, we suggest that these stencils represent an entirely different function in rock art through a process of memorialization that was rare, opportunistic and highly selective.

In this paper, I critically examine contemporary commemorative forms and practices known as ‘counter-monuments’ from an archaeological standpoint, in the process interrogating the conceptual underpinnings of the monument taxon as it is currently understood. Drawing on Tim Ingold's notion of perdurance, and through an exploration of counter-monumental concerns with form, siting and proxemics, I argue that memorialization can be seen as relationally emergent in the experiences of particular places. This claim is advanced through a discussion of the Cedar Creek Earthworks, a Woodland Period (c. 1–1550 ad) enclosure near Windsor, Canada, whose status as a monument can be understood, not as an ostentatious appeal to past events, but as a magnet for drawing out and assembling human and non-human relations in place.

The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evidence. It is argued that the Aboriginal understanding of cultural features and practices, rock art and the natural environment is best described within a framework of relational ontology. This orientation has important consequences for the conceptualization of a range of interrelated key themes, most importantly ‘space and place’, ‘story and narrative’ and ‘knowledge and representation’. Thus, the paper calls for the development of opportunities of intellectual engagement and exchange as well as collaborative and creative responses, which should also include new forms of expression in academic contexts that themselves reflexively engage with the limitations of writing and representation.

Images of the human form can be analysed for what they reveal about social roles, hierarchy, and other identities, as well as culturally determined perceptions about humanity's relationships to the natural environment and supernatural realm. It is proposed that the portrayal of the multitudinous human subjects related to religious ideology and practice in Rio Grande Tradition and Navajo rock art focuses on the interconnectedness of all things, deflecting meaning away from human beings as prime subjects as seen in Western religious art. Rather, informed by ethnographic data, the Native American abstracted, costumed forms, along with conflated human/animal subjects, define humanity's intimate link to the cosmos, and their added attributes evoke the supernatural strengths of other living beings, along with animated entities such as rain-clouds and the sun. These images themselves are perceived as active agents, attracting the pictured forces, sanctifying place and facilitating communication with resident spirits. What is pictured on stone extends to the performative dimensions of ethnographic contexts, thereby blurring the boundaries between the ceremonial participants, the representations and the animistic cosmos.

Serpent Mound, in northern Adams County, Ohio, USA, is one of the most iconic symbols of ancient America and yet there is no widely agreed upon date for the age of its original construction. Some archaeologists consider it to have been built by the Adena culture around 300 bc, while others contend it was built by the Fort Ancient culture around ad 1100. There have been three attempts to obtain radiometric ages for the effigy, but they have yielded inconclusive results. The iconography of the earthwork offers an alternative means of placing the mound in its cultural context. Serpent imagery is abundant in the Fort Ancient culture as well as in the more encompassing Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere. Pictographs from Picture Cave in Missouri include a serpent, a humanoid female and a vulvoid in close association. We interpret these elements, in the light of Siouan oral traditions, as First Woman and her consort the Great Serpent. The Picture Cave imagery dates to between ad 950 and 1025. We argue that these same three elements are represented in the original configuration of Serpent Mound and therefore situate its design and original construction in the Early Fort Ancient period.

In Ireland the supernatural sí (loosely translated as ‘fairies’) were strongly associated with thousands of archaeological monuments and natural places in the landscape, and many prehistoric artefacts were regarded as material culture of the sí. Such artefacts assumed an important role in popular religious practices, folk medicine and magic, most frequently to invoke cures for farm animals, but also to protect the homestead. Though little discussed in archaeological literature, the interpretation of prehistoric artefacts as potent objects from the supernatural world, and their ability actively to influence the well-being of livestock and the household, illustrates the rich and complex lives many archaeological artefacts assumed several thousand years after their initial manufacture, use and discard. The folk use of such artefacts as active agencies contrasts with the contemporaneous antiquarian collection and display of archaeological material as relics of ancient cultures.

This article presents evidence for prehistoric rice cultivation on the island of Jeju (Jejudo), Korea. It also discusses sociopolitical contexts in which the people of this island decided to incorporate rice into their lifeways. Although Jejudo is culturally closely related to the southern region of the Korean peninsula, the nearest landmass to the island, their environmental conditions are radically different. Jejudo is not suitable for intensive rice cultivation. Archaeobotanical research at Yerae-dong nonetheless confirmed that rice was consumed earlier than the emergence of institutionalized social hierarchy on the island. The evidence for status competition and exchange networks contemporaneous with rice remains raises the suggestion that rice was initially incorporated as an exotic and luxurious food, rather than a daily necessity. The earliest rice on Jejudo is unlikely to have been transferred to the island as a result of tributary trade between ancient states. Rather, this study demonstrated that the main agents of rice cultivation were the emergent local elites who attempted to express status and consolidate hierarchy with foreign objects.

Since the 1970s, research into Mesolithic landscapes has been heavily influenced by economic models of human activity where patterns of settlement and mobility result from the relationship between subsistence practices and the environment. However, in reconstructing these patterns we have tended to generalize both the modes of subsistence and the temporal and spatial variability of the environment, and ignored the role that cultural practices played in the way subsistence tasks were organized. While more recent research has emphasized the importance that cultural practices played in the way landscapes were perceived and understood, these have tended to underplay the role of subsistence and have continued to consider the environment in a very generalized manner. This paper argues that we can only develop detailed accounts of Mesolithic landscapes by looking at the specific forms of subsistence practice and the complex relationships they created with the environment. It will also show that the inhabitation of Mesolithic landscapes was structured around cultural attitudes to particular places and to the environment, and that this can be seen archaeologically through practices of deposition and recursive patterns of occupation at certain sites.