A distinctive aspect of human behaviour is the ability to think symbolically. However, tracking the origin of this capability is controversial. From a Peircean perspective, to know if something truly is a symbol we need to know the cultural context in which it was created. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it is more salient to ask how they functioned as signs. Specifically we argue that using the Peircean distinction between qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns provides support for this endeavour. The ‘flickering’ of early symbolic behaviour (the sporadic occurrences of objects with embedded social meanings in the Pleistocene archaeological record) can best be seen as sinsigns, whereas sites that show long-term presence of such materials are demonstrating the presence of legisigns: the codification of ideas. To illustrate this approach, we apply these ideas to three classes of artefacts, demonstrating how this system can address issues of relevance to palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists who often fetishize the symbolic as the one ability that makes us human.

One of the aspects of the relationship between rock art and shamanism, which has been supposed to be of a universal nature, inspired by trance experience, concerns the intentional integration of the images with rock. Rock surface therefore has been interpreted, in numerous shamanic rock-art contexts, as a veil beyond which the otherworld could be encountered. Such an idea was originally proposed in southern Africa, then within Upper Palaeolithic cave art and also other rock-art traditions in diverse parts of the world. This paper for the first time discusses the relevance of this observation from the perspective of unquestionable shamanic culture in Siberia. It shows that the idea of the otherworld to be found on the other side of the rock actually is a widespread motif of shamanic beliefs in Siberia, and that variants of this belief provide a new mode of insight into understanding the semantics of Siberian rock art. Siberian data therefore support previous hypotheses of the shamanic nature of associating rock images with rock surface.

The walls of Structure J at the Zapotec centre of Monte Albán incorporate monuments, probably carved during the Pe ceramic phase (300–100 bc), bearing distinctively formatted hieroglyphic inscriptions. Alfonso Caso suggested that hieroglyphic compounds on those monuments name regions conquered by Monte Albán. Many scholars accept an elaboration by Joyce Marcus on this proposal—that some of those compounds denote identifiable places outside the Valley of Oaxaca—and see the inscriptions as evidence for the territorial extent of an expansionist, Monte Albán-centred empire in the Late to Terminal Formative periods (300 bc–ad 200). This paper argues that Marcus’ proposed decipherments are implausible because they are structurally inconsistent with one another and with Zapotec scribal conventions for recording toponyms in other inscriptions. The Structure J texts remain undeciphered. Therefore they cannot now serve as evidence for the nature and reach of the Monte Albán polity, and generalizations about state formation that relied on Marcus’ readings need to be reconsidered.

Recent investigations at the Maya centre of Nakum (in Guatemala) enabled the study of the evolution of an interesting complex of buildings that started as the so-called E-Group, built during the Preclassic period (c. 600–300 bc). It was used for solar observations and rituals commemorating agricultural and calendrical cycles. During the Classic period (ad 250–800), the major building of the complex (Structure X) was converted into a large pyramidal temple where several burials, including at least one royal tomb, were placed. We were also able to document evidence of mortuary cults conducted by the Maya in the temple building situated above the burials. The architectural conversion documented in Structure X may reflect important religious and social changes: a transformation from the place where the Sun was observed and worshipped to the place where deceased and deified kings were apotheosized as the Sun Deity during the Classic. Thus the Maya transformed Structure X into one of the most sacred loci at Nakum by imbuing it with a complex solar and underworld symbolism and associating it with the cult of deified ancestors.

Late Early Bronze Age (EB IIB–III, 2500–2000 bc) evidence from the northeast Peloponnese and central Crete present two coeval sequences of events with very different societal outcomes. By drawing on resilience theory and the model of adaptive cycles, this article explores when and why the paths of mainland Greece and Crete diverged around 2200 bc, leading to an eventually destabilizing change on the mainland and a more sustainable one on Crete. It is argued that the two EB II societal structures were more similar than current discourse generally allows. However, during some hundred years leading up to the end of the EB II period, an increased societal uniformity and a decrease of social arenas on northeast Peloponnese may in the end have circumscribed the Early Helladic communities’ room to manoeuvre. Conversely, through strong regionalism and greater multiplicity of social arenas, Early Minoan societies seem to have retained a greater level of socio-economic variability that enabled proactiveness and sustained expansion through ideological change.

This paper analyses recently discussed evidence of over-imitation in Acheulean biface construction. First, it evaluates the argument for over-imitation using the available archaeological and cognitive science evidence. Next, it applies the four major theories of over-imitation, (1) Copy and Correct (C&C), (2) Automatic Causal Encoding (ACE), (3) social affiliation and (4) normative theory, as potential explanations for Acheulean over-imitation. ACE theory is the most likely explanation for early biface over-imitation (before 500,000 years bp), with social affiliation becoming increasingly likely after that. Normative over-imitation probably did not occur until around 300,000 years bp, when both the necessary hominin cognitive capacities and social conditions were present. An important conclusion emerging from this analysis is that over-imitation requires an integration of social and technical intelligence. Thus, the origins of cognitive fluidity may date back to as early as a million years ago, well before material evidence of fluidity is present.

In this paper, we examine a Terminal Formative-period (150 bc–ad 250) bundled offering from the site of Cerro de la Virgen, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The offering was emplaced below a prominent public building in the site's ceremonial centre and contained five stone objects, including a rain deity mask, a fragment of a second mask, a figurine of a deceased ancestor and two miniature table altars, as well as nine small ceramic vessels. Considered together as a ‘sacred bundle’, the stone objects collectively reference agricultural fertility, rulership and ancestor veneration, which we interpret to be a metaphorical invocation of a fundamental tenet of prehispanic Mesoamerican religious belief—the sacred covenant. The offering also played an active part in founding the community of Cerro de la Virgen, connecting its residents with the divine, the ancestors and the outside world and constituting differences in status among its members.

Archaeologies of colonialism have have called for exploring the culturally dynamic entanglements of people and objects while acknowledging the violence that accompanied these entanglements. Heeding these calls requires attention to how the state and state power were materialized, particularly in settler colonies where state apparatuses advanced unevenly, insidiously and clumsily. Here, I explore how the (mis)understandings and (mis)apprehensions of people and places that accompanied the halting expansion of colonial frontiers were materialized. Focusing on southern Africa's Highveld and Maloti-Drakensberg Mountains, I offer anxiety as a framework for conceiving of colonialisms as epistemic encounters: processes of ‘making sense’ of new people, things and places based on material practices, empirical experience and desire. Through a narrative of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg told with archival, archaeological and ethnographic materials, I revisit a longstanding trope of southern African archaeology and historiography: refugia from social distress. I argue that refuge can be taken as a sense-making practice rather than as reaction to stress. I close with thoughts on what an anxiety framework can offer the still-developing field of African historical archaeology.

New evidence of ritual seclusion and sensory deprivation, from the eastern margins of the Namib Desert suggests that specialized shamans may have operated alone, and possibly as itinerants, performing ritual services at widely scattered sites. This behaviour has its origins in hunter-gatherer responses to the introduction of pastoralism, and to the emergence of specialist rainmakers and healers during the second millennium ad. The research reported here identifies and explains important anomalies in the rock art and archaeology of hunter-gatherer religious practice in southern Africa.