This article focuses on the social group, asking how approaches to the representation of the group (in forms such as rock-art, images painted on pottery and three-dimensional caches of figurines) can help us understand the nature of collective experience in the past. Current research has concentrated on individuals (and their experiences) in past societies, while group dynamics have been neglected. Attention should be re-directed to the wide range of emotional experiences that we know affected individuals, particularly as part of their interactions with others, during rituals and other collective events in the past. Investigation of figurative representations over a sustained period provides one means of reconstructing the repetitive, stereotyped emotions, local rules, ‘non-rational’ propensities, moral sentiments, and shared emotions that shaped group life in past societies.

One tends to think of the study of pure number as an esoteric pursuit. But for the ancient Maya, particularly when it came to temporal matters, numbers were more than mere devices to tally units of time. In stark contrast to the Western calendar, in the Maya realm of timekeeping the duration between ritual events seems to have mattered as much as the times when the events themselves occurred. Moreover, the manner in which the daykeepers of the Maya codices sequenced the intervals followed well-defined patterns, which reveal an array of motives for the Maya way of structuring time. Among these motives were the need to: a) arrive at or avoid particular lucky or unlucky days; b) accommodate changing seasonal or other astronomical events; and c) set up numerological mirror symmetries, a characteristic that resonates with the Pythagorean philosophy of number. Thus the long-neglected study of Maya number offers insight into the chronological structure underlying ritual process, which finds parallels in contemporary Maya culture.

This article explores the relationship between human ontogeny — how people become who they are — and material change at the Bronze Age tell of Százhalombatta, Hungary. Shifts in domestic material culture and in the use of domestic space in houses imply altered developmental experiences for people living on the tell from the Early to Middle Bronze Age. These changes produced qualitatively different kinds of people at different points in time.

The deposits of disarticulated human remains in caves, often associated with designated ceramic receptacles, is one of the most striking hallmarks of the Chalcolithic period in the southern Levant. Owing however to their perplexing variability, this phenomenon is still poorly understood. Approaching these sites as cemeteries and social institutions, this article presents a reconsideration of their structures, temporal trajectories and meanings. It is argued that at least two regional subgroups can be distinguished, differing in the identities they structure, their concerns and their underlying logic.

This article addresses the visual culture of the Neolithic Near East, in particular that found on seals and sealings, objects often associated with information storage and administration. It considers the connection between those images and a broader Neolithic cosmology and, finally, the ways that both changed as cities replaced villages. The evidence is a set of imagery carved on small, portable objects such as palettes and seals, as well as their impressions on clay. By and large, seals have been studied as administrative and economic tools, part of a developing system of record-keeping in the millennia preceding the first writing. Their imagery, however, reveals elements of a basic cosmology, suggesting a religious context and meaning that precedes evidence of their use in administrative contexts. I posit that a) there are recurring motifs in the visual culture of the Neolithic Near East; and b) the subject matter of these motifs relates to religious beliefs and practices. I argue that to fully understand early seal use, we must proceed historically rather than ahistorically, first considering the primary association between these objects and cosmological concerns, and then broaden interpretations of later seal use, archive systems and ultimately writing, to consider how the content or meaning of the glyptic imagery may relate to those contexts.

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.

Archaeological investigations of public spectacle as mediated architecturally can provide an effective means to interpret culturally specific power asymmetries in prehistoric societies and the essential role of ritual performance in the creation of diverse forms of political subjectivity. A diachronic study of Late Formative (300–100 BC) and Moche (AD 550–800) ceremonial architecture from the Jequetepeque Valley in northern Peru demonstrates that archaeologists can approximate how power relations were materialized, conceptualized and contested in the Andes through their theatrical performance. Ultimately, a comparison of the performative construction of power with traditional archaeological indices of class-based inequalities reveals intriguing contradictions that both complicate and enrich our understanding of changing political structures in ancient Jequetepeque.