The naturalistic rock art of Yunnan Province is poorly known outside of China despite two decades of investigation by local researchers. The authors report on the first major international study of this art, its place in antiquity and its resemblance to some of the rock art of Europe, southern Africa and elsewhere. While not arguing a direct connection between China, Europe and other widely separated places, this article suggests that rock-art studies about the nature of style, culture contact and the transmission of iconography across space and time need to take better account of the results of neuroscience research, similar economic/ecological circumstances and the probability of independent invention.

Time and temporality have been at the centre of a number of accounts of burial practices in the Bronze Age of Britain in the last twenty years. Up to now, however, the temporality of practice has been taken as an indication of past understandings of time and/or the ancestors. In this article I wish to argue that the temporality of mortuary practices was not merely reflective of understandings of time, but in fact was constitutive of them, and that through the changing temporality of mortuary practices, people's engagement with monuments themselves was changed. These changing temporalities were driven by the transition from inhumation to cremation as the dominant mode of disposal of the dead. By invoking chaînes opératoires for each mode, I will demonstrate the underlying similarities and differences of the two rites, showing how cremation led to a fundamental change in the temporality of mortuary behaviour, and as such created new understandings of funerary monuments and place.

This article considers the role of anthropomorphic imagery in the constitution of subjects in Neolithic Thessaly, Greece. To accomplish that, material culture is seen as discourse, i.e. an articulating practice, which through its reiteration empowers certain positions rather than others. The objective of the study is to identify some aspects of the forms that specific anthropomorphic figures encourage or oblige those positions to take. These aspects pertain mainly to the human body. One conclusion is that there is a shift from an emphasis on the image of movement to an emphasis on the static image of the body and a concomitant interest in the head.

This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the world, which in turn provides new insights into the local mode of perceiving and engaging with the material world. The case of household spirits and human relationship with buildings is taken as an example. The archaeological material discussed in the article derives from the seventeenth-century town of Tornio in northern Finland.

Human sacrifice in ancient Mesoamerica was strongly linked with ritual behaviour and mythical beliefs. Yet it is rarely possible to explain the mythical associations of archaeological deposits derived from human sacrifice. In this article, we integrate archaeological, taphonomic and isotopic analysis to reconstruct the ritual behaviour that resulted in the formation of a partially cremated primary burial at the Lowland Maya city of Tikal. Taphonomic reconstruction reveals details about the form of death and combustion of two males, while isotopic studies hint at their probable geographic origin. To explain this ritual, we assess the relevance of widespread Mesoamerican mythical beliefs about the origin of the sun and the moon, and discuss the theoretical and methodological issues involved in this comparison. The burial's association with an E-Group compound makes it significant for the interpretation of these specialized architectural arrangements in southern Mesoamerica. It also pertains to a critical period in Tikal's history, marked by intensified cultural and political interaction with the highland Mexican city of Teotihuacan, manifest in this burial by the presence of imported green obsidian spear points. We propose that this unique context resulted from a sacrificial reenactment of the mythological birth of the sun and the moon.

Urbanization of the world's first cities involved the social integration of greater scales of community membership as well as the social differentiation of individuals along the continua of wealth, power, and occupational specialization that define urban landscapes. This article considers the causal role of public ritual in these processes during the period of incipient urbanism in central Mexico (c. 600 BC–AD 100) by examining temple and plaza offerings at La Laguna, a town within an urbanizing cultural landscape whose inhabitants participated in the transformative exchanges that resulted in urban state capitals such as Teotihuacan.

This article presents a study of the zoomorphic figurine assemblage from Neolithic Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. Figurine manufacture, depositional condition and contexts of discard are discussed, to find that their fragmentation seems related to fabrication methods and use rather than intentional breakage. We show animal figurines deriving mostly from midden contexts, indicating an expediency in their use. Analysis then focuses on a sub-set of 104 relatively complete quadruped figurines. We introduce a method for transparently grouping them into morphological types, with the aim of querying whether they reflect actual animal forms, and if so, to explore representational variation and consistency within those forms. Three key findings emerge from this sub-study: 1) while ambiguity exists, many figurines strongly suggest real animal forms; while wide morphological variation is seen within ‘taxon’ groups, there are clear areas of consistency in depiction, implying an intention for recognition that persisted over extensive time periods; 2) across animal forms, careful attention is given to modelling heads, horns, tails, and sometimes neck and forequarters, showing a hierarchy in representation; 3) figurine makers at Çatalhöyük were adept at expressing different forms of the same animal type, adults and juveniles, removable features, animal movement, and occasionally very finely modelled forms. The combined evidence — viewed alongside the Çatalhöyük faunal remains and other animal portrayals — is employed to consider alternative interpretations of the figurines. While no one interpretation fits the highly varied assemblage, we argue that they most likely played roles in real everyday activities, such as animal exchange, herding, management, hunting and tracking, and thus reflect aspects of human–animal engagements not witnessed by other archaeological finds.

Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 bc). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy.

This article investigates the shaping of place through memory and emotion. In particular it explores how, by engaging with particular kinds of materials, people texture locales in ways which help to structure future actions. By examining the manner in which deceased human bodies were engaged with at the British Neolithic site of Hambledon Hill, this article argues that we can trace the creation of these mnemonic and emotional geographies and so add to our understanding of how and why traditions of practice, including the deposition of human bone, were maintained through time.

The Indigenous Beothuk of Newfoundland disappeared as a cultural entity in the early nineteenth century. Prior to this, the Beothuk had few direct interactions with Europeans, and those that occurred were generally of a hostile nature. As a result, very little is known about Beothuk religious life. Drawing on available ethnohistoric records, an analysis of burial site locations and funerary objects, we offer an interpretation of Beothuk sacred cosmology that places birds at the centre of their belief system.

Painted rock art occurs throughout the islands of the Western Pacific and has previously been argued to have motif and design elements in common, indicating that it was created within the context of a shared symbolic system. Here we report five new painted rock-art sites from Kisar Island in eastern Indonesia and investigate the commonalities between this art and the painted art corpus in Timor-Leste, the independent nation that forms the eastern part of the neighbouring island of Timor. We examine the motifs in the Kisar art and suggest that, rather than being Neolithic in age, some of the figurative motifs more likely have a Metal Age origin, which in this region places them within the last 2500 years.

Many ancient city sites display a remarkable regularity in their plan which has led to considerable debate on the symbolism and intentionality which may lie behind these arrangements. Grid plan cities of the Greek and Roman world were discussed by Haverfield almost a century ago, but it was above all the cities of South and East Asia analyzed by Wheatley in his influential Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971) which has given new emphasis to the potential of meaning and significance. Such planned cities necessarily incorporate an essential tension between praxis — the practical day-to-day needs of the urban community — and idealism, the desire to impose on those practical concerns a city-plan which expresses a symbolic or cosmological image. Contemporary texts, where they exist, may help towards an answer, but the physicality of the city plan itself provides the crucial ground for argument as to whether symbolic or ideological imperatives governed the actual outcome. Cities may be conceptualized in ideal terms without ever taking on the physical attributes of any ideal form. The contributors to this Viewpoint approach the issue from a diversity of standpoints and with reference to different geographical areas. Were cities built as images? Did powerful belief systems combined with strong centralized control give rise to cities where the moat represented the encircling sea and the raised cathedral the mountain-dwelling of the gods? Or are such readings more the product of Western analysis and wishful thinking than the original intentions of their builders? The discussion here is opened by an architectural historian, who places city-planning firmly within the Western intellectual tradition, and considers it in particular as a product of Greek geometry. A series of regional specialists then take up the baton and assess the evidence for symbolic city planning in Egypt, the Roman world, South and Southeast Asia, and Mesoamerica. How far did cities of the Classical world conform to ideas set out by Aristotle and Vitruvius? Were the regulations of the Artashastra really adopted as a practical guide for city lay-out in South Asia? The balance of evidence — of what may have been intended, against what was actually laid out on the ground — provides fertile ground for a stimulating diversity of opinions.

This study describes material imagery portraying anthropomorphic subjects executed in stone and clay which appear on sites of the Yarmukian culture in the Southern Levant during the sixth millennium BC. Speculations are made and interpretations offered for the incised stone and clay images of persons and genitals as artefacts recording encoded information. It is suggested that some kinds of imagery are associated with age and reproductive status and relate to gender categorization, and yet other kinds could be related to socio-political discussion.

The image-based discourse on clay figurines that treated them as merely artistic representations, the meaning of which needs to be deciphered through various iconological methods, has been severely critiqued and challenged in the past decade. This discourse, however, has largely shaped the way that figurines are depicted in archaeological iterations and publications, and it is this corpus of images that has in turn shaped further thinking and discussion on figurines, especially since very few people are able to handle the original, three-dimensional, physical objects. Building on the changing intellectual climate in figurine studies, we propose here a framework that treats figurines as multi-sensorial, affective and dynamic objects, acting within distinctive, relational fields of sensoriality. Furthermore, we situate a range of digital, computational methods within this framework in an attempt to deprive them of their latent Cartesianism and mentalism, and we demonstrate how we have applied them to the study of Neolithic figurines from the site of Koutroulou Magoula in Greece. We argue that such methodologies, situated within an experiential framework, not only provide new means of understanding, interpretation and dissemination, but, most importantly, enable researchers and the public to explore the sensorial affordances and affective potential of things, in the past as well as in the present.

Concerned with the ‘meaning’, variability and material transformation of the sacred oboo cairns of Inner Asia, this study focuses upon four of these stone settings within the environs of Mergen Monastery. Two have been rebuilt since their destruction during the Cultural Revolution, and one markedly registers its recent history. The layout of these complex monuments (involving diverse ancillary elements) reflects the processes of Buddhicization of the landscape. Comparison between their form and Buddhist texts outlining oboo construction allows appraisal of their prescription and actuality. These monuments raise issues relevant beyond their immediate cultural and geographical context, as they express an interplay between history and ‘timelessness’; the latter effectively amounting to a ‘reincarnation’ of material culture (i.e. denial of change). Finally, the deployment of oboos relates to broader concepts of landscape orientation; their relationship with Mongolian directional systems is explored.

New developments in the natural sciences are contributing to new thinking on the nature of matter, materiality and being. Such re-visioning of the natural world is, in part, responsible for ‘the ontological turn’, a trend clearly visible in recent archaeological discourse. In combination with evolving relational and symmetrical approaches to investigating the constitution of ‘the social’, the door is open for exploring logics, taxonomies and understandings of reality different from our own in studies of the past. Applying these ideas to the investigation of early imperialism, this paper offers an analysis of a key element in the repertoire of Inca material culture that forwards the importance of human–thing relations in the context of early state politics. Working from the basis of the imperial Inca ceramic assemblage, the study examines how these objects were deployed in the task of empire-building and what insights they provide into Andean ontological commitments during the late pre-Columbian period. An argument is developed that imperial pots were construed as animate beings and agents of the State. The study brings to the fore the mutually constituted nature of the imperial Inca project and suggests new avenues for future research that highlight the matter of early empires.

The island of Sri Lanka, situated off the tip of southern India, is often perceived as the recipient of material culture diffused from more northerly regions. This article counters this model by suggesting that Sri Lanka may have played a pivotal role in the development of Brahmi, South Asia's earliest readable script. Sherds inscribed with this script, recently found at Anuradhapura, with dates of the beginning of the fourth century BC, now represent its earliest dated examples anywhere in the subcontinent. By analyzing the sherds' archaeological and scriptural context it presents a tentative mechanism for Brahmi's development and spread through South Asia and concludes by discussing the dynamic relationships between scripts, langtiage, material culture and ethnic division within Sri Lanka.

Through an examination of land use during the late Holocene, this article explores the changing nature of place and identity in what is today Djungan country (NE Australia). We begin with the notion that use of place is mediated by historically positioned systems of meaning. We further contend that through praxis (as social practice), experience of place participates in the structuring and construction of identity. By examining changes in the way a distinctive mountain — Ngarrabullgan (Mt Midligan) — has been incorporated within the broader socio-cultural landscape through time, we conclude that major alterations took place in peoples’ relations to their surroundings, and by implication in the construction of landscapes, life experiences and identity, around the fourteenth century AD. This has implications for the way we project ethnographic details, attuned to Dreaming-based ontological views of the world, into the more distant past.

Narratives of human evolution place considerable emphasis upon human cognitive development resulting from the evolution of brain architecture and witnessed by the production of ‘symbolic’ material culture. Recent work has modified the narrative to the extent that cognitive development is treated as the product of humanity's ability to download certain aspects of brain functionality, such as the storage of information, into external media. This article questions the centrality given to the history of brain architecture as determinate of human cognition by rejecting the widespread assumption that cognition trades in representations, either stored internally in the brain or downloaded externally into cultural media. The alternative, offered here, is that human cognitive development was constructed through the development of joint attention made possible by the anatomical development of hominins and that this sustained a shared empathy between social agents in their practical understanding of the qualities of materiality.