Few subjects have excited the imagination of archaeologists working in ancient complex societies as have monumentality and urban planning. Yet the two topics are rarely explicitly theorized in a sustained integrated investigation within a single study, despite the fact that monumental architecture is often considered a primary basis for identifying the presence of urban planning. This article makes the related methodological arguments that both phenomena benefit from a more full consideration of one another, and that the meaningful aspect of monumentality and urban symbology needs to be considered in conjunction with the formal aspect of monuments and urban layouts. These positions are then implemented in a study of the Syro-Anatolian city-state system that existed in the ancient Near East during the early first millennium bc. The capital cities of these polities were characterized by a program of monumentality that brought royalty, city walls, gates and monumental sculpture into an unmistakable constellation of associations. The consistency of this pattern of monumentality and urban form suggests that at least a degree of urban planning existed.

This article discusses contact, social relationships, and social organization between sites at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Euphrates valley; all of which are of high importance for reconstructing and modelling social organization in consolidated agricultural villages. Our analysis has succeeded in identifying a complex range of overlapping levels and types of social interaction that occurred simultaneously and operated at different scales including the household, the community and inter-regional communities. This complex mixture of interacting spheres, together with the identification of cultural-social boundaries, enables us to understand and explain inter-site variation in material culture and mortuary practices. Moreover, they reflect the growing social complexity of large farming communities at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the role played by settlement as the social unit through which these communities became more distinctive and self-consciously different.

Chronological and stylistic studies of Roman wall paintings and mosaics were based for a long time only on optical direct analysis and current analogue or digital photographic reproduction. The aims of fresco research today remain the same as in the past — i.e. pigment types and sources, painting subjects and styles, application methods, and the relationship between paintings and the function of their locations. Modern technologies, however, have now been developed which can finally improve our knowledge about ancient decorative taste and workshops. New methodologies such as highly accurate colour reproduction of paintings and mosaics, digital reconstruction of fragmentary decorations, or chemical analyses of pigments or plasters are increasingly being used to fill important research gaps. Some of these techniques are illustrated in this article as solutions to obstacles in the archaeological documentation of an unpublished first-century ad painting (Late Flavian period) on the Caelian Hill in Rome. With relation to Fourth Style decorations, the problematic question as to whether there was an intentional ratio between the component parts of the fresco is also discussed, linking for the first time the Vitruvian architectural concept of Commodulatio (meaning ‘with symmetry/proportion’) to wall paintings.

The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or society as a whole. This study proposes an alternative model. By reviewing indigenous terminology from later historical periods, it proposes that urbanism evolved in the context of a metaphorical extension of the household that represented a creative transformation of a familiar structure. The first cities were unintended consequences of this transformation, which may seem ‘revolutionary’ to archaeologists but did not to their inhabitants. This alternative model calls into question the applicability of terms like ‘urbanism’ and ‘the state’ for early Mesopotamian society.

The 1000-year Neolithic occupation of An Son in southern Vietnam consists of ceramics that belong to a tradition that was potentially ancestral to those in many other regions of mainland Southeast Asia. The forms, dimensions, modes of decoration and fabrics of the An Son ceramics throughout the site's occupation have been studied in detail. The morphological dimensions were analysed with coefficient of variation (CV) calculations and the fabrics were characterized using scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDX), in conjunction with statistical applications such as principal components analysis (PCA), cluster analysis and canonical variate analysis (CVA). The results suggest that a coherent method of manufacture and a mental template was applied in the manufacture of each major rim form that existed throughout the occupation of An Son. These vessel forms had a continuous evolution with evidence for conservatism in the shape and raw materials, while innovation and variation was observed in the decorative variables. The established mental templates indicate that the organization of ceramic production at An Son was linked to tradition and function in the community.

The study of clay tokens in the Ancient Near East has focused, for the most part, on their role as antecedents to the cuneiform script. Starting with Pierre Amiet and Maurice Lambert in the 1960s the theory was put forward that tokens, or calculi, represent an early cognitive attempt at recording. This theory was taken up by Denise Schmandt-Besserat who studied a large diachronic corpus of Near Eastern tokens. Since then little has been written except in response to Schmandt-Besserat's writings. Most discussions of tokens have generally focused on the time period between the eighth and fourth millennium bc with the assumption that token use drops off as writing gains ground in administrative contexts. Now excavations in southeastern Turkey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe — the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital Tušhan — have uncovered a corpus of tokens dating to the first millennium bc. This is a significant new contribution to the documented material. These tokens are found in association with a range of other artefacts of administrative culture — tablets, dockets, sealings and weights — in a manner which indicates that they had cognitive value concurrent with the cuneiform writing system and suggests that tokens were an important tool in Neo-Assyrian imperial administration.