The Grooved Ware complex in Later Neolithic Britain has proved a perplexing phenomenon for prehistorians. While originally identified by Stuart Piggott as one of a series of ‘Secondary Neolithic Cultures’, it was later recognized as a special-purpose assemblage, connected with inter-regional contacts between socially pre-eminent groups. Yet Grooved Ware appears to have been at once special and mundane, ceremonial and domestic. In this contribution I suggest that Grooved Ware and its associated domestic architecture, originating in the north of Scotland, provided a medium for the elaboration of the notion of the domestic community in southern Britain, creating a new conception of the social at a time of profound change. Communal feasting, monumental structures and pit deposition all drew upon the imagery of the house and the household to provide a new means of social integration.

Remnants of stationary fishing structures on the Northwest Coast of North America are commonly investigated by archaeologists, with most studies focusing on questions of function and chronology. Here it is argued that in Native Northwest Coast ontologies fish and fishing structures were considered animate and part of the social worlds within which humans and fish were engaged. Fish were considered capable of retaliating against those who treated them improperly, and one way of ensuring that no offence would occur was to dismantle fish traps when they were not in use. Using recently documented archaeological fishing structures on Willapa Bay, Washington, USA, as examples, it is argued that these and many other Northwest Coast archaeological fish traps were partially dismantled in the past.

The aim of this article is to situate archaeological approaches to modern conflicts within a framework of conflict memory and commemoration. A critical appreciation of historical archaeology as a commemorative practice requires a firm grounding in memory theory, specifically the formation and contestation of memory narratives. This article offers a detailed analysis of the relevant theories and demonstrates their applicability in the contested archaeology of the Nazi era in Berlin. On the basis of this critique I argue that archaeological work on contested sites offers a unique and powerful forum for socially engaged interdisciplinary research.

In this article we explore a pair of distinctive and associated Second World War monuments on Slapton Sands in the South Hams district of Devon, UK. The Slapton Sands Evacuation Memorial was erected in 1945 by the US armed forces to commemorate the sacrifice of local people who evacuated their homes ahead of battle training in preparation for D-Day. Meanwhile, the Torcross Tank Memorial was built in 1984 under the initiative of a local man to commemorate those US servicemen who lost their lives during the battle training in the Exercise Tiger tragedy. The historical context, form, materiality, biography and location of each monument are appraised and their relationship with each other is discussed. The article argues that from the 1940s to the present day, the monuments have evolved as sacrificial sites and serve to both commemorate the events they describe and define the identities of local people through their reuse of places and material culture.

The naturalistic rock art of Yunnan Province is poorly known outside of China despite two decades of investigation by local researchers. The authors report on the first major international study of this art, its place in antiquity and its resemblance to some of the rock art of Europe, southern Africa and elsewhere. While not arguing a direct connection between China, Europe and other widely separated places, this article suggests that rock-art studies about the nature of style, culture contact and the transmission of iconography across space and time need to take better account of the results of neuroscience research, similar economic/ecological circumstances and the probability of independent invention.

This article examines aspects of social memory in the Aurignacian mobiliary art of southwest Germany. An analytical distinction is introduced between cultural and communicative memory with different characteristics and functions in Palaeolithic social life. It is argued that the statuettes are reflections of cultural memory, but also stood in a complex and unstable relationship with the flexible conditions of everyday life. The figurative objects are not passive reproductions of collective ideas. Rather, they have to be seen as products of an active individual and intense concern with the field of meanings and associations of cultural memory, and consequently represent individual variations of a socially shared meaningful ideology

The Neopalatial period of Middle to Late Bronze Age Crete is marked by a dramatic increase in the depiction of non-human animals. In contrast to the domesticates listed in the Linear A documents, the animals which appear on frescoes and seals are largely wild or supernatural, or in non-domestic scenes (particularly bull-leaping). This article seeks to explore the quantitative differences between the types of animals displayed on different media, and ask why non-domestic animals appear in such significant proportions. Arthur Evans and subsequent scholars have explained this phenomenon as an expression of interest in the natural world. Instead of this modernist view, it will be argued here that it is by trying to approach these depictions as expressing specifically Bronze Age human-animal relations that the role of such animals in Cretan society can be understood. From a relational perspective, the animals depicted can be seen as active participants in prestige activities such as hunting or bull-leaping rather than the passive motifs of artistic naturalists. This perspective might also provide a more illuminating answer to the question: why depict animals?