Based on more than a decade of research on the Taraco Peninsula, Titicaca Basin, Bolivia, we discuss the role of memory, tradition and ancestral participation from the earliest settled communities to the founding and influence of the Tiwanaku order. We examine the shifting role of social memory vis-à-vis public ceremonies, pottery and food production. While the earlier phases give a sense of familial community and the construction of place through ancestor veneration, the later phases suggest stronger lineage commemoration, with families acting as gravitational forces in the burgeoning political developments. Our diachronic study on the Taraco Peninsula tracks these practices illustrating the movement along a discursive–non-discursive continuum, with some practices brought to the surface and politicized.

This article examines the roles of socio-symbolic practices and cosmological beliefs in the production and exchange of stone artefacts in an ethnohistorically documented context in Australia. Isabel McBryde's petrological and ethnohistorical analysis of greenstone axe distribution patterns in central Victoria provides a key example of social factors overriding technological concerns in the production and exchange of lithic artefacts. Her research shows that greenstone axes from Mt William quarry were distributed further than axes from equivalent sources. This suggests that Mt William stone axes had symbolic values that cannot be appreciated from straightforward economic perspectives – the aim of this article is to investigate why. A detailed consideration of the ethnohistorical evidence highlights the embeddedness of axe technology in cultural perceptions of landscape and the belief systems of Aboriginal people.

Imitation and shared intentionality are traits essential to the socio-cultural adaptation of Homo sapiens. Non-human apes display some capacity for imitation and shared intentionality, but are deficient in comparison to Homo sapiens. The Acheulean archaeological record provides evidence that imitation and shared intentionality were part of the behavioural repertoire of the hominins manufacturing that industry. The palaeoneurological record suggests some early Homo specimens possessed the neural architecture associated with modern human imitation. From this evidence it is suggested that a propensity for imitation and shared intentionality evolved soon after 2 million years ago.

In China, a number of signs from some Late Neolithic contexts suggest that recoding activities were well developed before Chinese writing became widespread during the Shang period. Archaeological and palaeographic evidence indicates that mature writing is likely to have evolved from these earlier signing systems as a result of the increasing social and political complexity of the societies of the Late Neolithic. This article analyses three Late Neolithic signing systems that may have led to the mature Chinese writing of the Shang oracle bone inscriptions, and argues that non-linguistic visual signing played a role in the emergence of writing systems.

Ancient cities as documented by archaeologists and historians have considerable relevance for a broader understanding of modern cities and general processes of urbanization. This article reviews three themes that illustrate such relevance: sprawl, squatter settlements and urban sustainability. Archaeology's potential for illuminating these and other topics, however, remains largely unrealized because we have failed to develop the concepts and methods required to analyse such processes in the past. The following aspects are examined for each of the three themes: the modern situation, the potential insights that archaeology could contribute, and what archaeologists would need to do to produce those insights. The author then discusses some of the benefits that would accrue from increased communication between archaeologists and other scholars of urbanism.

Swan images (Cygnus sp.) are the most common symbols at petroglyph sites on the eastern shore of Lake Onega, northwest Russia, where rock engraving most likely occurred around the mid-Neolithic period. At some sites they constitute over 60 per cent of all glyphs and they are the only glyph type common to all sites. The abundance of swan symbols at a given Onega site correlates most strongly with the abundance of cervids (mostly elk). There are even partially superimposed elk–swan engravings where part of one animal contributes to the other's body. There is evidence that, during the mid-Neolithic, early sites at Lake Onega were submerged by rising water levels, most probably coinciding with a period of climatic cooling. By that point, new petroglyph sites had been created further north by the Vodla river. Here swan images are larger and more abundant and other glyphs (such as solar/lunar) are absent. It is suggested that the swan was a supernatural symbol. Its prominence at the more recent Vodla sites may be indicative of greater importance being given to this species in the context of environmental change and an associated greater struggle for survival. Thus, the swan symbol may have been perceived by the local Neolithic Finno-Ugric people as an agent for the intended reversal or control of such external challenges, and selected from a pre-existing mythological framework based on its associated traits and perceived powers.