Dedicatory offerings of small colourful objects are often found in pre-Hispanic architectural contexts in the Ancestral Pueblo region of the American Southwest. These deposits are particularly numerous in the roof support pillars of circular ritual structures (kivas) at the site of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, which served as the ceremonial hub of the Chacoan regional system between the tenth and twelfth centuries ce. Based on the importance of directionality and colour in traditional Pueblo worldviews, archaeologists speculate that the contents of these radial offerings may likewise reference significant Chacoan cosmographic elements. In this paper, I explore this idea by examining the distribution of colours and materials in kiva pilaster repositories in relation to directional quadrants, prominent landscape features, and raw material sources. I discuss the results in the context of Pueblo cosmology and assemblage theory, arguing that particular colours were polyvalent and relational, deriving their meanings from their positions within interacting and heterogenous assemblages.

As a raw material, ivory has been used to manufacture a wide range of objects, normally associated with sumptuous material culture. In this article we explore the role played by ivory and ivory artefacts among early complex societies, and particularly its importance in the definition of identities among emergent elites. To this end, we make a thorough examination of the evidence from Copper Age Iberia, focusing on the mega-site of Valencina, in southern Spain. This site has provided what to date is the largest assemblage of prehistoric ivory in western Europe, with an estimated total of 8.8 kg, including finely crafted artefacts of unrivalled beauty and sophistication. Our study looks carefully at the technological, morphological and contextual dimensions of Copper Age ivory. As a result, we contend that the broad morphological variability together with the technological uniformity of this assemblage suggest that, while belonging to a common technological tradition, objects were deliberately crafted as unique and unrepeatable so that they could be used to create and maintain socio-cultural idiosyncrasies and ideological legitimation.

We propose a new theory of human cognitive evolution, which we term Complementary Cognition. We build on evidence for individual neurocognitive specialization regarding search abilities in the modern population, and propose that our species cooperatively searches and adapts through a system of group-level cognition. This paper sets out a coherent theory to explain why Complementary Cognition evolved and the conditions responsible for its emergence. Using the framework of search, we show that Complementary Cognition can be contextualized as part of a hierarchy of systems including genetic search and cognitive search. We propose that, just as genetic search drives phenotypic adaptation and evolution, complementary cognitive search is central to understanding how our species adapts and evolves through culture. Complementary Cognition has far-reaching implications since it may help to explain the emergence of behavioural modernity and provides a new explanatory framework for why language and many aspects of cooperation evolved. We believe that Complementary Cognition underpins our species’ success and has important implications for how modern-day systems are designed.

In this study, we outline a maritime perspective on interaction in the Late Bronze/early Iron Age Mediterranean. In response to what has elsewhere been termed the ‘maximalist’ approach, which foregrounds direct, long-distance trading connections between distant Mediterranean regions as a key feature of Late Bronze Age exchange systems, we propose a more nuanced, ‘minimalist’ and argue that notions of contact, connectivity and mobility need to be carefully distinguished if we wish to discuss both the material and social dimensions of maritime mobility. In particular, we critique the prominently proposed, allegedly direct trade route between Sardinia and Cyprus. The network we suggest hinges on multiply connected nodes, where a variety of social actors take part in the creation and maintenance of maritime connections. By unpacking several such nodes between Sardinia and Cyprus, we demonstrate that simply asserting the dominance of Sardinian, Cypriot or Aegean mariners falls short of the complex archaeological evidence and eschews possible social interpretations. In conclusion, we submit that maritime connectivity is an inherently social activity, and that a culturally diverse prehistoric Mediterranean was connected by multiple interlocking and overlapping networks.

Studies into the presence and absence of post-European contact rock art within Indigenous communities are particularly relevant to questions of colonial impact and influence. However, it is the presence of post-contact motifs and introduced subject matter that typically takes precedence in these studies. In this paper, we focus on the absence of post-contact paintings of European ships in Torres Strait (northeastern Australia) rock art. This absence is curious, given that Torres Strait peoples first encountered European ships over 400 years ago, yet the only paintings of watercraft are of their own double outrigger canoes. Furthermore, ethnographic information suggests many painted canoes were spirit canoes used by spirits of the dead, and European mariners were considered spirits of the dead who travelled in ‘ghost ships’. Despite apparent epistemological and ontological congruence between Islander and Kaurareg canoes and European ships, we argue the latter were conceptually and metaphysically different to spirit canoes and thus fell outside of the representational (rock art) genre of watercraft that was limited to spirit canoes. The lack of Torres Strait post-contact rock art reveals that reasons for the inclusion of introduced subject matter in post-contact rock art are likely to extend beyond simple exposure to, and familiarity with, so-called new subject matter.

Dental modification represents one interesting aspect of corporeal adornment in human history that directly reflects personal social identity. Tooth filing choices distinguished certain individuals at the urban, Maya political capital of Mayapan from 1150 to 1450 ad, along with cranial modification, nose and ear piercings, tattoos and body paint. Here we examine how filing teeth, considered a beautification practice for women at Spanish Contact in the sixteenth century, is distributed across a skeletal sample of males, females, elites and commoners in this city. We evaluate the normative claim of the Colonial period and determine that while predominantly females filed their teeth, most women chose not to. Sculptural art further reveals that male personages associated with the city's feathered serpent priesthood exhibited filed teeth, and we explore the symbolic meaning of filed tooth shape. Assessing the practice in terms of associated archaeological contexts, chronology and bone chemistry reveals that it did not correlate with social class, dietary differences, or birthplace. Residents of Mayapan, a densely inhabited, multi-ethnic city of 20,000, engaged with multiple material expressions of belonging to intersecting imagined communities that crosscut competing influences of polity, city, hometown and family scale identity. Tooth filing reflects identities at the individual or family scale.

Recovering the agency, skill and innovation of archaeological field assistants from historical encounters is essential to interrogating processes of knowledge production, but is often hampered by access to appropriate archival sources and methods. We detail a field project from early twentieth-century Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho) that is unique both for its aim to salvage details of rock-art production as a dying craft and for its archive chronicling the project's intellectual journey from experiment to draft manuscripts to published work over more than three decades. We argue that critical historiographic attention to this archive offers a guide for examining the intimate dynamics of fieldwork and the effects of these micropolitics on the archaeological canon. We demonstrate how sustained attention to long processes of knowledge production can pinpoint multiple instances in which the usability of field assistants’ scientific knowledge is qualified, validated, or rejected, and in this case how an African assistant is transformed into an ethnographic interlocutor. For rock-art studies especially, this represents a need for interrogating the epistemic cultures—not just the content—of foundational historical data.

This paper proposes a novel procedural framework for the archaeological study of the long-term transformation of religious practices by heuristically defining the religious in terms of their functional-effective elements. Thus, religious activities constitute a distinct communicative domain that responds to and processes the uncertainties and risks of the world. Drawing on this re-definition, this paper proposes a procedure comprising the following units of investigation: (A) what uncertainties and risks of the world were generated in and differentiated by a certain social formation; (B) how were they responded to and processed; and (C) how is the mode of the responding and processing changed as social formations are transformed? The applicability of this procedure is examined through a case study from the pre- and proto-historic periods of the Japanese archipelago. It is hoped that the framework reintroduces causally explanatory, comparative and long-term perspectives to the archaeological study of religious practices.