This study examines a painted combat scene on a ceramic vessel of the Moche culture (ad 100–800) of the north coast of Peru. The scene portrays a series of distinctly Moche warriors fighting adversaries who feature characteristics (weaponry, ornaments and dress) that are unconventional for Moche visual culture. Correspondences in Recuay pottery and stone sculpture instead support the argument that the enemies were groups from the neighbouring inland valleys and highlands of the Pacific Andean flanks. The analysis of the imagery and its implications illuminate how societies without writing sometimes perceived and configured interaction with other groups — namely, through representations of warfare.

This article outlines the results of phenomenological research on the significance of landscape features, in particular ridges and coombe (dry valley) systems, in relation to the locations of Bronze Age round barrows and late Bronze Age/early Iron Age crossridge and spur dykes constructed along a chalk ridge in central southern England. It considers the locations of these monuments in a holistic manner and argues that together the round barrows, and then subsequently the dykes, network or draw together very different aspects of the topography in narratives about life and death. The round barrows differentially reference the significance of these places metaphorically through a combination of their specific locations. By contrast, the monumental courses of the dykes physically impose themselves on, or objectify the significance of, the same landscape features, but in a radically different manner indicating both continuity and difference in the historical significance of place.

Evidence for a hunter-gatherer range-expansion is indicated by the site of Station One in the northern Sudan, a surface scatter of chipped stone debris systematically collected almost 40 years ago, though not studied until present. Based on technological and typological correlates in East Africa, the predominant use of quartz pebbles for raw material, and the production of small bifacial tools, the site can be classified as Middle Stone Age. While often appearing in East African assemblages, quartz was rarely used in Nubia, where ferrocrete sandstone and Nile pebble were predominantly used by all other Middle Palaeolithic/Middle Stone Age populations. Additionally, façonnage reduction is characteristic of lithic technology in East Africa in the late Middle Stone Age, while Middle Palaeolithic industries in the Nile Valley display only core reduction. It is proposed this assemblage represents a range-expansion of Middle Stone Age hunter-gatherers from East Africa during an Upper Pleistocene pluvial.

The Neolithic tombs of northern Europe have often been presented as built in the image of the hous e of the dead. We wish to discuss here the different terms of this proposition in the light of recent discoveries concerning the domestic habitat in western France, whence we draw most of the architectural examples — both funerary and domestic.

The ashmounds of the central Deccan Plateau remain one of the most enigmatic features of the South Indian Neolithic. While Allchin proposed a primarily ritualistic interpretation for the large mounds of burnt cattle dung, more recent discussion has often stressed more prosaic understandings, underlining the adaptive or economic significance of the ashmounds as indicators of pastoralism or stressing the possibility that they represent accidental or sanitation-related fires. This article argues for a return to more symbolic perspectives on the ashmounds, and offers further support for a ritualistic reading based on evidence relating to the landscape context of ashmounds and other Neolithic remains in the central Deccan region. The article explores the landscape associations of ashmounds in the Bellary District of Karnataka, and in particular draws on new discoveries at the sites of Kudatini and Toranagallu in order to reconstruct aspects of a Southern Neolithic ‘world view’ or cosmology. The article also explores the implications of the ashmounds to subsequent developments in the Indian subcontinent, particularly those relating to the symbolic importance of cattle, dung and ash in Hindu practices, and argues for long-term continuities in certain prehistoric material symbols (though not their associated meanings). In addition, the article takes a wider comparative approach, and explores the implications of South Indian Neolithic practices for our understanding of the Neolithic ‘process’ in general, and in particular the emphasis on transformative processes that appears to distinguish Neolithic approaches to the material world from those that preceded them.

City walls invite functionalist explanations. It is at first sight easy to deduce why they were built. Where contemporary written and pictorial evidence survives, however, the subject begins to take on a cognitive dimension. Did people at the time really perceive them as we are apt to imagine? The subject has been extensively discussed in the context of medieval Europe where contemporary pictures and contemporary accounts can be set against the architectural remains themselves. City walls were built for status and symbolism as much as for protection. The following collective discussion of the subject in the context of Egyptian history, both ancient and medieval, seeks to follow the same approach: to confront the documentation of the changing practice of urban walling with evidence that represents the mindset of the day. For the time of the Pharaohs the subject is complicated — and made more rewarding as a consequence — by the immense effort which the Egyptians also devoted to walled enclosures around prominent religious buildings. Here the temptation for us is to create a separate category from walled settlements, but on a basis that could be quite misleading. Although the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane is apparent in the construction of walls, meanings change and the distinction is far less apparent in the subsequent use of these enclosures. In medieval Egypt the massive walls of Cairo, parts of which are still an impressive sight, also turn out to be a poor guide to how urban defence was generally perceived at that time. As is ever the case in archaeology, the relationship between the minds of the present, the minds of the past and the objects of reflection forms a subtle and complex triangle.

A tradition of enclosure walls developed in Egypt very early on. Until recently the evidence was primarily artistic, in the shape of depictions on several late prehistoric palettes of symbols representing enclosed areas of square layout with rounded corners and numerous external buttresses. These images seem to depict walled inhabited settlements, and they belong to artistic compositions that also portray fighting and other violence; and together such scenes are often seen as reflecting local struggles along the road of state formation.

The majority of large-scale enclosure walls constructed in Egypt in the second millennium bc were built around temples rather than towns. These walls were high and massive, sometimes with multiple enceintes, while details such as buttresses and crenellations appear to have related the design to contemporary defensive architecture. A libation basin from Memphis demonstrates clearly that a temple could be viewed as equivalent to a fortress by local inhabitants while the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu was closely modelled on contemporary fortress construction. These enclosure walls often represent a very significant investment of resources but are difficult to explain as defensive. Unlike town walls, temple enclosures were not optional extras but were an essential part of the architecture of the shrine.

The first millennium bc brought warfare to the interior of Egypt on a significant scale. We have two vivid records, one written and the other pictorial. The former is a first-person narrative of the Napatan (Sudanese) king Piankhy who, having gained control of the south of Egypt, embarked in 730 bc on a methodical subjugation of the rest of the country, then under the rule of several local families. During the seemingly irresistible northward progress of his army Piankhy makes frequent reference to walls with battlements and gates which could be countered with siege towers/battering rams and the erection of earthen ramps, although Piankhy himself preferred the tactic of direct storming. Within the circuit of these walls lay treasuries and granaries and, in the case of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, the palace of the local king Nemlut together with its stables for horses.

It has been established in the preceding sections that settlement walls were by no means uncommon in ancient Egypt, and it is from this tradition that the late Roman and early Islamic urban configuration developed. With the incorporation of the country into the Roman empire, it was inevitable that changes would be made to its defensive situation, and the continuing Hellenization of the upper classes would alter perceptions of the urban ideal. This section will consider to what extent these forces brought Egypt into line with other eastern Roman provinces, and how the urban enceinte developed after the Arab conquest of the country in 642.

How people have classified things is one of the defining aspects of cognitive archaeology. Here we have been looking at the most obvious physical manifestations of protection, namely large enclosure walls.