Archaeological studies of specialized craft production in hierarchies often highlight the crucial roles of prestige goods in ancient political economies. Yet elaborate crafted items are also produced and circulated widely in heterarchically-ordered societies, where powerful elites are absent. In this latter case, attributing crafting to the agency of elites — or to the demands of political economy — is unconvincing. This article investigates the alternative cultural logic underlying crafting in heterarchies, seeking to understand both the contexts of crafting and the nature of the ‘social projects’ in which artisans were engaged. Expectations for archaeological signatures of craft activity are developed and applied to a case study, drawing upon recent excavations in northwest Argentina.

A San rock-art site in northeastern South Africa includes several intriguing features, including rubbed patches of pigment and a red line painted on top of a quartz vein. This article interrogates the relationships between hunter-gatherer beliefs, materiality and rock paintings, and suggests that San painters and viewers engaged with the unique Mpumalangan site for specific ritualistic purposes.

The increasing influence of New Animism is providing useful ways of interpreting rock art as well as ways to move beyond generalizing models based upon Cartesian principles. However, the increasing attention to animism runs the risk of simply replacing one generalization with another. To avoid the pitfalls of generalization, this article sets out to explore the ways in which relational ontology may have been communicated throughout indigenous society in a specific case study from south-central California. To do this requires adopting a ‘third space’ approach (Porr & Bell 2011) to detail the didactic and pedagogical narrative roles of rock art and mythology in south-central California. Paraphrasing Bird-David (2006), the goal is to understand how an animistic epistemology is enacted into an institutionalized way of knowing. To do this, I look closely at new information on rock-art chronology in conjunction with mythological narratives. It is suggested that the vibrant pictographs of the region drew upon ontological notions of the past embodied at specific places in the landscape and that the narrative structure of myth helps inform our understanding of the narrative structure of rock-art composition. This provides an appreciation of indigenous perceptions of time, which in turn shows that mythology was a template for human institutions while explaining rock art as another ontological institution that was part-and-parcel of relational ideologies associated with ‘delayed-return’ complex societies of south-central California.

In recent years, material culture studies have come to embrace contemporary Melanesia and European prehistory, but not classical archaeology and art. Prehistory is still thought, in many quarters, to be intrinsically more ‘ethnographic’ than historical periods; in this discourse, the Greeks (by default) become proto-modern individuals, necessarily opposed to Melanesian ‘dividuals’. Developments in the study of the Iron Age Mediterranean and the world of Homer should undermine such stark polarities. Historic and proto-historic archaeologies have rich potential for refining our notions both of agency and of personhood. This article argues that the forms of material entanglements we find in the Homeric poems, and the forms of agency (sensu Gell 1998) that we can observe in the archaeological record for the Early Iron Age of Greece (broadly 1000–500 bc) are of the same kind. The agency of objects structures Homeric narrative, and Homeric descriptions allow us precisely to define Homeric ‘human–thing entanglement’. This form of ‘material entanglement’ does not appear in the Aegean world before 1100 BC.

This article engages with current debates in archaeology with respect to matters of ontological difference — particularly in terms of bodies, personhood and the much-contested category of the individual. Drawing on early Spanish historical accounts of the material and bodily practices through which the Inka sovereign was constituted, I argue that although he was certainly not a Cartesian individual, neither was he a kind of fractal or partible person. Contrary to the growing tendency to see non-Western modes of personhood as highly ‘relational’, the Inka emperor was in my view a bounded and tightly delineated entity, albeit one not contiguous with a biological body. In archaeological theory, a growing divide appears to be emerging between relational and individual species of personhood — with the former often ascribed to non-modern societies, and the latter frequently associated with the modern West. I present a critique of this trend and argue for the need to break beyond such binaries — interpreting the Inka emperor as a form of individual that stood outside a nature/society divide and thus still very much incommensurable with Western ontologies of the person.

While duels and other types of fighting with a relatively low level of lethal risk are well known from the ethnographic record, these have been less studied from an archaeological perspective. These fights are different from ‘war’ in the lack of killing intent and they are commonly referred to as ‘ritual fighting’, thus implying the social significance of the act and not just the outcome. Our study concentrates on the Late Pottery Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of the southern Levant from which the physical evidence of violence is relatively scarce, although conflicts are assumed to have intensified due to the increase in long-term settlements and density of population. We will argue that the three types of weapons found during these periods — maceheads, slingstones and transverse arrowheads — are characterized by dull or blunt peripheries and were intentionally designed not to cause maximal injury or inflict lethal blows. These weapons are well represented only after the hunting of wild game dramatically declined and we suggest that they represent the conduct of low-level fighting, consequently indicating the presence of rules and social organization that are essential elements for the formation of early complex societies.

Humans define themselves through personhood as agents in society. To become persons, children differentiate their self from others. They take, as George Mead (1934) says, the other and self-objectify by predicating a sign-image or trope upon themselves. Birth rituals realize these tropes with the child's body as tool and raw material. Birth almanacs in Highland Mexican codices depict, as I argue, the transformation of a child into a person. Patron gods pierce the child, display it, manipulate its umbilical cord and nurse it. Gods provide the child with vital life forces while the child and future adult nourishes the gods through sacrifice. The birth almanacs situate Aztec personhood in a covenant of humans with gods. As children mature, bodily changes metonymically express the metaphoric relationship of the children with their patron gods. In the bathing ceremony, fellow humans — especially the child's parents and the midwife — step into the roles of the patron gods and perform the above activities on the child. Aztec children other themselves in gods through ritual practices. By connecting the ideology and practice of personhood, the birth almanacs are a theory of social action.

This study expands perceptions of ritual behaviour in the British Iron Age, which conventionally focus on the deposition and burial of objects. Classification of animal bones as special deposits in Iron Age Britain, and interpretation of the ritual activities they may represent, has tended to concentrate on the significance of their burial location and composition and/or the cultural perception of the particular animal species deposited. Other than for consumption and sacrifice, little consideration has been given to the complex, dynamic histories (biographies) and cultural significance of animal remains in the period between death and burial. Detailed examination of the taphonomic and pre-depositional histories of animal deposits, are one means by which it is possible to explore the activities that occurred above ground in the past. Zooarchaeological investigations of a group of cattle and horse skulls from Battlesbury Bowl, Hampshire, provide an excellent example of a ‘special deposit’ where it was the objects themselves, as much as their species, location or structured burial that held special significance for the Iron Age community. By taking a biographical approach, we can create detailed narratives of archaeological animal bones and their treatment, thereby expanding the view of activities that fall under the ‘ritual’ umbrella.

At Umm el-Marra in western Syria, a sequence of Bronze Age ritual installations facilitates the investigation of how Syrian elites employed memory, ancestor veneration, and animal (and perhaps human) sacrifice to reinforce their position, and how others used countermemory to contest it. Relevant data derive from an Early Bronze Age complex of elite tombs and animal interments and a Middle Bronze Age monumental platform and shaft containing animal and human bodies deposited ritually. Analysis of the spatial landscape, with patterns of access or inaccessibility, facilitates additional insights, as does the consideration of the intentionality or lack of it in ancient references to the past.

Building on recent criticisms of Romanization, this contribution formulates a systematic critique of the concept of Egyptianization and suggests a different theoretical approach to cultural process in New Kingdom Nubia that benefits from the insights of ‘cultural entanglement’. This approach emphasizes multidirectional and interactive perspectives that allow for a variety of acculturative outcomes rather than one-sided assimilation. A useful epistemological framework for its application in archaeology is illustrated through two case studies, focusing respectively on representations of Egyptianized Nubians in Egyptian art and Lower Nubian burial customs. The outcomes of the case studies argue for a provocative re-reading of cultural process in New Kingdom Lower Nubia, and may help to clarify the general picture of Nubian history by explaining why and how Nubian traits re-appeared in the Napatan-Meroitic Kingdom of Kush. Finally, the article considers some broader methodological and theoretical issues relating to cultural mixture in the archaeological record.