The paper explores and compares the ways in which Neolithic heritage in Greece and Turkey—two archaeologically and historically influential cases—has been used at the level of the state and the diverse meanings, values and histories ascribed to it by local communities and public discourse. Using four very representative examples as case studies, including the World Heritage sites of Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey as well as Dimini and Dispilio in Greece, the paper demonstrates how Neolithic spaces are used by different agents to install a certain image of history and to form a collective memory, but also to emphasize difference and discontinuity. The main aim is to explore the relationship between heritage, space and history. Special emphasis is placed on the politics of history or historiography and identity at all levels and on the placement of the debates into a larger historical and discursive context.

Tell sites are central to archaeological interpretation in many world regions due to their lengthy sequences of stratified deposits. However, the cultural choices that create architectural remnants and associated materials are more poorly understood, as are the ways that previous layers situate the living community above. This article calls for agentive understandings of tell-formation processes through examination of archaeological sites in Burkina Faso, West Africa. We argue that tells here formed through strong cultural beliefs of co-residence between the living and ancestral communities. Drawing on data from excavation and cross-section profiles exposed by road construction, we provide evidence that architectural remnants were actively created and preserved in rituals related to the making and veneration of ancestors. Particular places in tells were used for new construction (often with foundation ritual deposits) only after the active memory of the individual faded from the living community, resulting in a slow (at least 80–100 years) stratification process. Through variations on these core ritual processes, dynamic multi-temporal social groups reinvented themselves over 1500 years through eras of inequity, egalitarian revolution and the Black Death pandemic.

This article analyses the development of Neolithic earthen architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean as a concrete example of ‘communities of practice’. Recent studies on earthen architecture have highlighted its adaptability to different climates, architectural forms and craftmanship levels, focusing on the technological aspects of earthen construction. This paper explores the anthropological significance of earth as a building material. It provides evidence on the development of earthen building techniques, interactions between different communities regarding building practices and an understanding of the dynamics of chaîne opératoire in relation to various materials. A review of archaeological case studies provides compelling preliminary evidence for the existence of early specialized architecture in Neolithic Aegean contexts.

European ideas about unicorns spread across the world in the colonial era. In South Africa, hunts for that creature, and indigenous rock paintings of it, were commonplace. The aim was proof from ‘terra incognita’, often with the possibility of claiming a reward. There has, however, been little consideration of the independent, local creature onto which the unicorn was transposed. During cross-cultural engagements, foreign beliefs in the mythical unicorn and a desire for evidence of its natural history intermixed to an extraordinary degree with local beliefs in a one-horned animal. For over two centuries, colonists and researchers alike failed to realize that the local creature, by chance, resembled the European unicorn. A new synthesis of southern African ethnography, history and the writings of early travellers, missionaries and colonial politicians provides unambiguous evidence that one-horned creatures obtained in local beliefs before the arrival of colonists. Moreover, it shows that these creatures are depicted in South African rock art, and that they are a manifestation of San (Bushman) rain-animals. By ignoring relevant beliefs and images, previous scholars have failed to acknowledge that the South African unicorn was, apart from its four legs and single horn, a creature wholly different from the European one.

Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence distributed across both space and time. One way of interpreting archaeohistory suggests that rock art played a significant role in cognitive evolution through its engagement in ritual.

Reconstructing the technical and cognitive abilities of past hominins requires an understanding of how skills like stone toolmaking were learned and transmitted. We ask how much of the variability in the uptake of knapping skill is due to the characteristics of the knapping sequences themselves? Fundamental to skill acquisition is proceduralization, the process whereby skilful tasks are converted from declarative memories (consciously memorized facts and events) into procedural memories (sub-consciously memorized actions) via repetitive practice. From knapping footage, we time and encode each action involved in discoidal, handaxe, Levallois and prismatic blade production. The structure and complexity of these reduction sequences were quantified using k-mer analysis and Markov chains. The amount of time spent on tasks and the pattern of core rotations revealed portions of these reduction sequences that are predisposed to being converted into procedural memories. We observed two major pathways to achieve this proceduralization: either a repetitive or a predictable sequence of core rotations. Later Acheulean handaxes and Levallois knapping involved a predictable platform selection sequence, while prismatic blade knapping involved a repetitive exploitation of platforms. Technologies and the portions of their reduction sequence that lend themselves to proceduralization probably facilitated the more rapid uptake of stone toolmaking skill.

San forager populations in nineteenth-century southern Africa were forced to adapt to greatly destructive aspects of the colonial project. Forging new societies from heterogeneous sources, they engaged in prolonged armed insurgency, recording their exploits, presence and beliefs in the rock-art archive of the Maloti-Drakensberg. These images reference conflict and trauma, conventionally interpreted as visions of spiritual warfare. However, viewed through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), deeper dimensions emerge. PTSD is the culturally subjective experience of generalizable neuropathologies which develop following a traumatic event. Diagnosable in diverse communities worldwide, it nonetheless requires insider idioms to understand its local expressions. We explore how PTSD manifested in this historic and cultural context; how its symptomatic social dysfunctions would have been understood in forager aetiology, and how its intrusive flashbacks would have intruded on altered-state experiences induced to heal the consequences of violence. We find that the artists were not passive victims of trauma, but rather used art symbolically to reconsolidate individual and collective understandings of traumatic events.

In this article we put forward an alternative account of the famous wristguards, or bracers, of the European Early Bronze Age. Combining new materialism with empirical microwear analysis, we study 15 examples from Britain in detail and suggest a different way of conceptualizing these objects. Rather than demanding they have a singular function, we treat these objects as ‘multiplicities’ and as always in process. This, in turn, has significant implications for the important archaeological concepts of typology and object biography and our understandings of material culture more widely.

Theories derived from the ontological, posthumanist, or the new materialist turn have been increasingly employed in various fields within archaeology in the past decade. Recently, Roman archaeology also picked up on these theories: however, critical integration as well as more theoretical refinement is necessary to show the real potential of such theories. New materialism is not about writing a ‘history of objects’, but about a better ontological positioning of the non-human and human otherness. For Roman archaeology it can therefore be a powerful tool to broaden our perspectives on material culture and diverse social issues such as inequality, marginalized communities, slavery and coloniality. In this paper I will show how we can regard ontological fluidity in the Roman world through a new theoretical lens.