The origins of the Neolithic in the Near East were accompanied by significant ritual and symbolic innovations. New light is thrown on the social context of these changes by the discovery of a bone wand displaying two engraved human faces from the Early Neolithic site of Tell Qarassa in Syria, dating from the late ninth millennium BC. This small bone object from a funerary layer can be related to monumental statuary of the same period in the southern Levant and south-east Anatolia that probably depicted powerful supernatural beings. It may also betoken a new way of perceiving human identity and of facing the inevitability of death. By representing the deceased in visual form the living and the dead were brought closer together.

Scandinavian rock art may in general be regarded as idealized depictions of a social world, not a direct description of concrete social matters. Even so, rock art does convey important social information that calls for more thorough comment. This study concerns almost 1700 ship depictions from western Sweden that include human representations. The average ship is depicted with a crew of six to thirteen individuals and these craft may have represented prevailing ideals about the crewing of ships. The large ship images with numerous crews in clearly defined positions may be depictions of war canoes, staged for special maritime events. The study shows that the visual proportions of the rock-art ships are similar to those of the prehistoric war canoe from Hjortspring, Denmark. It is argued that the praxis of pecking ships into the rocks could have served to manifest the agency of the maritime social world and, to some extent, to make this ideology more dominant.