The grinding of stone to make sharp cutting edges did not evolve with the emergence of biologically modern humans in Africa, but late in the Pleistocene at the completion or nearcompletion of the Out-of-Africa 2 migration. Here we discuss the earliest securely-dated fragment of ground-edge axe from Australia, dated at 35,500 cal. bp, an age slightly older or comparable to the earliest ages for edge-grinding from the Pacific Ocean's western seaboard. In this region ground-edge axes did not evolve with the emergence of agriculture, nor for the clearance of forests, but, rather, as socially mediated technology, part of the development of symbolic storage that is the hallmark of the evolution of cognitively modern humans at the geographical end, during, or following, Out-of-Africa 2.

Coinage occupies an unusual position in archaeological research. Thriving scholarship on numismatics and monetary history ensures that the objects themselves are well-studied, often seen as an indication of chronology and of stylistic and commercial links. Yet coins might also be analysed as artefacts, and explored as part of the symbolic world of material culture through which archaeologists understand meaning and value in past societies. Using a recently-excavated assemblage of medieval Kilwa-type coins from Songo Mnara on the East African Swahili coast, this article explores the multiple ways that value was ascribed and created through use, rejecting a simple dichotomy between substantive and formal value. Attention is given to the contexts of the coins, which enables a discussion of the relationship between power and the constitution of value, the circulation and use of coins among townspeople, and their use within ritual and commemorative activity.

For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the ‘modernity’ of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence — the most extensively studied — was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this.

One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone — from a minor component to a medium of choice — during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution.

Concepts such as creolization and hybridity offer inclusive frameworks to study identity formation emanating from cross-cultural interaction. The borrowing of such concepts developed from recent history must contend with their relevance for the past as well as their applicability for understanding objects with mixed cultural features. This article reassesses the hybrid concept by contrasting a cognitive approach that identifies the figurative processes behind the local adaptation of foreign things. Looking at objects from Han China and the northern Black Sea, I examine how nomads and imperial agents conceptualized foreign objects through metonymic and metaphoric associations to influence understandings of self and group identity.

The origins of archaeological methods are often surprising, revealing unexpected connections between science, art and entertainment. This article explores aerial survey, a visual method commonly represented as distancing or objective. We show how aerial survey's visualizing practices embody subjective notions of vision emerging throughout the nineteenth century. Aerial survey smashes linear perspective, fragments time-space, and places radical doubt at the root of claims to truth. Its techniques involve hallucination, and its affinities are with stop-motion photography and cinema. Exposing the juvenile dementia of aerial survey's infancy releases practitioners and critics from the impulse to defend or demolish its ‘enlightenment’ credentials.

During the middle and late Holocene, the prehistoric inhabitants of the Sahara articulated their agency under conditions of aridification in part through aesthetic symbolic behaviour that became petrified, as it were, in ubiquitous rock art. Rock art, predominantly depicting domestic animals, continued to be produced throughout the later Holocene, despite deteriorating environmental conditions that necessitated other adaptive strategies. Artistic production appears to have ignored the environmental changes and evolved an aesthetic that, initially, celebrated animals for the function for which they were domesticated and, subsequently, for their looks, symbolic capital and potential to express status. In the most recent periods, art production evolves into a symbolism that is entirely based on, and communicated through, camel imagery.

A monolithic view of Classic Maya society as dominated by divine rulers who inexplicably ceased to erect monuments with long-count dates during the ninth century is examined by reference to new information from Terminal Classic sites in the Sibun Valley of Belize. In this locale and elsewhere, the construction of circular one-room buildings — with striking associated artefacts — may be interpreted as signalling social tensions between the orthodoxy of Classic Maya divine rulers and the more heterodoxic beliefs and practices associated with circular structures built at the end of the Classic period. The round buildings are contextualized within the diversity of architectural expressions of the Sibun Valley and also within a peninsula-wide network of shrines. The chronological placement and character of the Sibun shrines is discussed by way of radiocarbon assays, obsidian sourced by INAA, and raw materials used for groundstone at sites throughout the valley. The presence of marine shell and speleothems — likely used as architectural adornment — found in close association with Sibun Valley round buildings permits discussion of the manner in which elements of the local effected a translation of heterodoxic tenets into vernacularized shrine architecture.