Nearly seventy years ago, a group of competitive explorers, few on good terms, reconnoitred the Maya ruins of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. There, in what is now known as Structure 1, they found the most densely figured and compositionally ambitious paintings from Precolumbian America – the Bonampak murals, in a building dated by their final, painted notation to c. AD 791. The themes, events, dramatis personae, dynastic setting and execution of the murals find general consensus among scholars, if with some disagreement about detail and, in some respects, the overall thematic focus of the paintings. A key, under-used resource consists of some 125 texts or captions in hieroglyphic writing that identify, or studiously ignore, the serried warriors, dancers in feathered costumes, courtly ladies, foes in extremis, ambassadors, and lords in repose that crowd the murals. Brought to crisp view by infrared vidicon imaging in 1996, subsequently processed and here reported, the captions pose further questions about the decision to name people, past and present. The typology, positioning, relative weighting and onomastic contents of the captions at Bonampak clarify a veridical story, artfully positioned and cadenced, that stresses a tale of three youths. Likely brothers, they can be seen to enjoy a distinct centrality in the murals, more so than the ruler himself. The Bonampak paintings thus discharge several functions. They offer a specific account of a prince's career, assisted by two young peers, a primer for the skills and accomplishments of a suitable heir, a vertical account of generational interplay at times of transition, and a horizontal lesson, too, that a good prince both leads and relies on brothers, close kin and courtiers for collective success. Whether the path to the throne was completed remains an unresolved matter, insoluble without further evidence.

During the Middle Pre-pottery Neolithic B in the southern Levant the use of lime plaster in both ritual and domestic contexts increased significantly relative to previous periods. Its properties of whiteness, purity, plasticity and antisepsis would have made it a natural choice for decorating, and through the act of colouring disparate categories of objects were linked together. Plaster appears to have transcended its own inherent value as a material due to its interconnectedness with mortuary ritual. Because of its ubiquity, this socially ascribed value was accessible to everyone. This article will claim that plaster, and the act of plastering both ritual and domestic contexts played a key role in the creation and maintenance of community cohesion and social well-being.

Rock-art research offers to archaeology a problem-oriented approach. A case study is presented on the interpretation of rock-art from informed ethnographic and formal archaeological perspectives regarding the origins of the Midewiwin, or ‘Grand Medicine Society’. The evidence is twofold. First, some of the rock-paintings that are found over a wide range of the southern Canadian Shield appear to be representative of the Midewiwin. Second, the most probable age estimation of those rock-paintings indicates that the antiquity of Midewiwin is greater than generally presumed by the key anthropological reference literature of the region. Rather than a relatively recent ‘revitalization movement’, the origins of the Midewiwin began in remote antiquity. Broad theoretical and methodological issues of cognitive archaeology and the crisis of representation are addressed, particularly classification, colonialism and cultural linguistics.

An examination of meanings associated with bears among early hunter-gatherer-fisher populations in northern Fennoscandia, based on beliefs and ritual practices in the ethnohistoric record, indicates that they were an animal attributed multiple meanings in prehistoric as well as historic times. They were clan ancestors, spirit masters and symbols of power and reincarnation such as rebirth and the change of seasons. The evidence indicates a pattern of local variation and identities rather than a uniform regional pattern, and some large-scale differences from the coastal area of Norway in the west to Karelia in the east.

For various reasons increased effort has recently been made to detect the early use of mechanically-projected weaponry in the archaeological record, but little effort has yet been made to investigate explicitly what these tool sets could indicate about human cognitive evolution. Based on recent evidence for the use of bow-and-arrow technology during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa by 64 kya, we use the method of generating and analysing cognigrams and effective chains to explore thought-and-action sequences associated with this technology. We show that, when isolated, neither the production of a simple bow, nor that of a stone-tipped arrow, can be reasonably interpreted to indicate tool behaviour that is cognitively more complex than the composite artefacts produced by Neanderthals or archaic modern Homo. On the other hand, as soon as a bow-and-arrow set is used as an effective group of tools, a novel cognitive development is expressed in technological symbiosis, i.e. the ability to conceptualize a set of separate, yet inter-dependent tools. Such complementary tool sets are able to unleash new properties of a tool, inconceivable without the active, simultaneous manipulation of another tool. Consequently, flexibility regarding decision-making and taking action is amplified. The archaeological evidence for such amplified conceptual and technological modularization implies a range of cognitive and behavioural complexity and flexibility that is basic to human behaviour today.

In the late sixteenth century, Portuguese missionaries encountered a vast city at Angkor. Abandoned for 150 years, it had been partially restored as a Buddhist piligrimage centre but many of the monuments had been given over to the forest. They wondered about its origins. Some suggested that it was the work of Trajan, others of Alexander the Great. Following the establishment of the French colonial empire in Southeast Asia three centuries later, and in the absence of any information on prehistoric societies, the civilization of Angkor was seen as the result of Indianization, whereby Indian religions, architecture, writing and language were adopted by the indigenous inhabitants. This article presents the results of twenty years of research in the upper Mun Valley of northeast Thailand, an area that was part of the Kingdom of Angkor and seat of the dynasty of two of its greatest kings, Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII. For the first time, the entire prehistoric cultural sequence from late hunter-gatherers to the end of the Iron Age has been documented and dated. We find that after the ingress of rice farmers from southern China in the mid second millennium BC, there were two surges in social complexity. Both were coincidental with the availability of new exotic goods through exchange. The first took place in the initial Bronze Age, in the eleventh century BC, and was followed by several centuries of relative poverty in mortuary practices. The second took place in the late Iron Age and led directly to the foundation of powerful chiefdoms from which can be traced the genesis of early civilizations in Southeast Asia, including that of Angkor.