The Neopalatial period of Middle to Late Bronze Age Crete is marked by a dramatic increase in the depiction of non-human animals. In contrast to the domesticates listed in the Linear A documents, the animals which appear on frescoes and seals are largely wild or supernatural, or in non-domestic scenes (particularly bull-leaping). This article seeks to explore the quantitative differences between the types of animals displayed on different media, and ask why non-domestic animals appear in such significant proportions. Arthur Evans and subsequent scholars have explained this phenomenon as an expression of interest in the natural world. Instead of this modernist view, it will be argued here that it is by trying to approach these depictions as expressing specifically Bronze Age human-animal relations that the role of such animals in Cretan society can be understood. From a relational perspective, the animals depicted can be seen as active participants in prestige activities such as hunting or bull-leaping rather than the passive motifs of artistic naturalists. This perspective might also provide a more illuminating answer to the question: why depict animals?

The Dynamic figures are a distinctive component in the earlier rock-art of western Arnhem Land, north Australia. They include therianthropic (hybrid human–animal) images. Recent vision experience ethnographically known in the region, and the wider pattern of Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) in hunter-gatherer societies, are consistent with elements of the Dynamics. One key feature is the use of dots and dashes in the Dynamic images, explicable as a depiction of some intangible power, of a character comparable with that in the ‘clever men's knowledge’ of modern Arnhem Land. Tropical Australia thereby is added to the number of regions where a visionary element is identified in rock-art; the specific circumstances in Arnhem Land, permitting the use together of formal and of informed methods, provide unusually strong evidence.

This article uses results from the recent excavations at Çatalhöyük in Turkey to propose that continuous tensions between egalitarian and hierarchical impulses were dealt with in two principal ways during the Neolithic of the Middle East. A tendency towards overall balance and community (termed molar) is seen as in tension with more particulate and molecular tendencies, with both being brought into play in order to combat inequalities. It is also suggested that tendencies towards more molecular systems increased over time, at different rates and in different ways in different places, partly as a response to constraints associated with more molar articulations. Finally, it is proposed that a shift to molecular autonomy was associated with agricultural intensification. Staying egalitarian can be seen as an active process that contributed to the Neolithic transformations.

This article outlines the results of phenomenological research on the significance of landscape features, in particular ridges and coombe (dry valley) systems, in relation to the locations of Bronze Age round barrows and late Bronze Age/early Iron Age crossridge and spur dykes constructed along a chalk ridge in central southern England. It considers the locations of these monuments in a holistic manner and argues that together the round barrows, and then subsequently the dykes, network or draw together very different aspects of the topography in narratives about life and death. The round barrows differentially reference the significance of these places metaphorically through a combination of their specific locations. By contrast, the monumental courses of the dykes physically impose themselves on, or objectify the significance of, the same landscape features, but in a radically different manner indicating both continuity and difference in the historical significance of place.

Archaeological discoveries of dead individuals, usually in the form of burials, have frequently captured the imaginations of public and professional audiences alike. In addition to the allure of exotic artefacts and seemingly bizarre funeral rites, burials offer rich possibilities for investigating myriad aspects of past social, cultural and even individual life. This discussion focuses on one of the more renowned archaeological excavations of an ancient cemetery, the Royal Cemetery of Ur. Consideration of who was and who was not buried in the cemetery suggests that cemetery burial was the prerogative of those people who were closely attached to ‘public’ institutions. This leads to a number of observations on Sumerian treatment of the dead and attitudes toward death, as these can be approached from archaeological and textual sources.

To what extent do we need structuralist cognitive settlement models such as the Central Cattle Pattern and the Zimbabwe Pattern for future research and understanding of Iron Age social life in southern Africa? How will alternative approaches enable us to progress beyond the present status of knowledge? While the three last decades of debate have underpinned key aspects of archaeological inquiry, notably questions of social change, gender dynamics, analytical scale and the use of ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological insights, the sometimes entrenched nature of the debate has in other respects hindered development of new approaches and restrained the range of themes and topics scholars engage with. In this article, we identify the issues of analytical scale and recursiveness as key to the development of future approaches and present an alternative framework through empirically grounded discussion of three central Iron Age themes: ceramics and the microscale, the spatiality of metal production and the temporality of stonewalled architecture.

Augustus' propaganda founded the ruler's power on a series of references to the sky: Caesar's comet, which helped to establish the divine nature of kingship, the completion of the calendar's reform celebrated in the Campus Martius' meridian, and Augustus' association with Capricorn, the zodiacal sign of the winter solstice. Various forms of proof derived from texts, works of art and numismatics show the key role of such a ‘power from the stars’. We present here new archaeological and archaeoastronomical evidence coming from Augusta Praetoria Salassorum (modern Aosta), founded around 25 bc after the victory of Augustus' army on the Salassi. An emergency excavation along the Aosta's Roman walls has brought to light, on a corner of one of the towers, an in situ block which carries several reliefs — including a plough and a spade — apparently related to the town's foundation ritual. As a consequence, we carried out a complete analysis of the original urban plan of Aosta and of its relationship with the sky and the landscape, taking into account the complex natural horizon of the Alps in which Aosta's valley is nested. The results show that the town was oriented in such a way as to pinpoint Augustus' ‘cognitive’ relationship with the ‘cosmic’ signs of renewal.

This article discusses contact, social relationships, and social organization between sites at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic in the Euphrates valley; all of which are of high importance for reconstructing and modelling social organization in consolidated agricultural villages. Our analysis has succeeded in identifying a complex range of overlapping levels and types of social interaction that occurred simultaneously and operated at different scales including the household, the community and inter-regional communities. This complex mixture of interacting spheres, together with the identification of cultural-social boundaries, enables us to understand and explain inter-site variation in material culture and mortuary practices. Moreover, they reflect the growing social complexity of large farming communities at the end of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic and the role played by settlement as the social unit through which these communities became more distinctive and self-consciously different.

Twenty-seven radiocarbon results are now available from the Fussell's Lodge long barrow, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Three alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. It is hard to decide between these, though we prefer the third. In the first (following the excavator), the construction is a unitary one, and the human remains included are by definition already old. In the second, the primary mortuary structure is seen as having two phases, and is set within a timber enclosure; these are later closed by the construction of a long barrow. In that model of the sequence, deposition began in the thirty-eighth century cal. bc and the mortuary structure was extended probably in the 3660s–3650s cal. bc; the long barrow was probably built in the 3630s–3620s cal. bc; ancestral remains are not in question; and the use of the primary structure may have lasted for a century or so. In the third, preferred model, a variant of the second, we envisage the inclusion of some ancestral remains in the primary mortuary structure alongside fresh remains. This provides different estimates of the date of initial construction (probably in the last quarter of the thirty-eighth century cal. bc or the first half of the thirty-seventh century cal. bc) and the duration of primary use, but agrees in setting the date of the long barrow probably in the 3630s–3620s cal. bc. These results are discussed in relation to the development and meanings of long barrows at both national and local scales.

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.

During the past thirty years the Survey of Memphis and others have acquired more than two hundred borehole logs from the Capital Zone of Egypt. Combining these boreholes with maps and satellite images, we show that, during the past five thousand years, the geography of the Nile has been in constant flux with mean rates of migration around 2 m/y and one of its channels becoming extinct, by nature or through human intervention. Re-visiting ancient texts in the light of this changing environment, we show that the literary settings of both fictional and historical texts were real landscapes known to the authors. Hence we infer that ancient descriptions of landscape can be interpreted in a more literal way than before and that the authors were not as prone to writing of a metaphorical realm as was previously thought.

Posthumanist or new materialist tools, positions and conversations contain some useful ideas for archaeologists to think with, but others that I find deeply problematic. In this opinion piece, I organize my thoughts around three posthumanist ‘turns’ to objects and materials, relations and assemblages, and non-human animacy. I appreciate how some strands of Posthumanism can help us think more creatively and thoughtfully about relations between humans and non-humans, but I argue against non-anthropocentrism, flat ontology and symmetrical archaeology. Animacy and perspectivism can help remedy colonialist and late-stage capitalist destructive forces, but archaeologists should take care not simply to appropriate, patronize, or re-colonize non-western thinkers. Ultimately, I argue, we should not need continental philosophy to remind us to care about one other, all living creatures and the well-being of our shared planet. What is needed today are ethics, not convoluted turns toward objects.

The chaîne opératoire (CO) approach is a well-established method for the analysis of tool creation, use and discard, and associated cognitive processes. Its effectiveness in respect of cognition, however, is occasionally challenged. We briefly review key critiques of its epistemological and methodological limitations and consider alternative options. We suggest a new epistemological position and methodology which can link CO with alternative cognitive models and with the true complexity inherent in the stone tool archaeological record. Perception-action and embodied cognition theory are the proposed foundations of a new epistemology that allows us to reject the concept of thought processes underlying tool-making sequences as static entities selected from memory. Instead, they are described as arising, changing and flowing with and through bodily activity, or as the products of constant interaction between body, mind and environment. They are better understood as ongoing processes of situated task-structuring rather than as objectified concepts or symbols. The new methodology is designed to analyse individual tool-making processes rather than their products. We use a pilot study to explore how it can highlight variations in the gestural processes that structure different technologies and thus indicate potential differences in the associated cognitive strategies of the various tool-makers concerned.

Fragments of possible fired clay found at Boncuklu Höyük, central Turkey, appear to derive from rudimentary vessels, despite the later ninth- and early eighth-millennium cal. bc and thus ‘Aceramic’ dates for the site. This paper will examine the evidence for such fired clay vessels at Boncuklu and consider their implications as examples of some of the earliest pottery in Anatolia. The discussion will examine contextual evidence for the role of these fragments and consider their relative rarity at the site and the implications for the marked widespread adoption of pottery in southwest Asia c. 7000–6700 cal. bc.

Archaeologists increasingly recognize a need to revise the scales at which we investigate identities such as gender, class and faction in ancient complex societies. In this article I present research on the expression of gender roles and ideologies in the performance of mortuary ritual in four distinctive residential areas of Classic Teotihuacan, including the urban compounds of La Ventilla 3, Tlajinga 33 and Tlailotlacan 6 and the hinterland settlement of Axotlan. Results indicate that gender was constructed and experienced differently across Teotihuacan society. This research demonstrates that multiscalar, comparative approaches to social identity make possible a fuller understanding of the significance of social heterogeneity in structuring early states.

Aggregated villages with large, central plazas appeared across the Western Pueblo region of the US Southwest by the fourteenth century AD. We view the adoption of this settlement form not strictly as an adaptive response to economic and social circumstances, but rather as a reflection of changes in the social relations of power and conceptualizations of community in the Pueblo world. Enclosed plazas became a form of panoptic architecture, structuring what were intrinsically unequal social relations between individuals or groups and the entire communities of which they were a part. This process has implications for the emergence of new power relations in pre-state societies.

This article examines the boundaries of clothing and the body in constructions of political identity in French colonial Louisiana. The study situates constructions of political identity among regulatory demands over the bodies of colonial subjects and the practices of taste and social distinction. It is argued that dress allowed colonial subjects to move into political spaces usually occupied by European colonizers. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and visual data are used to investigate how French colonizers attempted to construct a body politic by regulating dress and the bodies of colonial subjects, while colonial ‘others’ attempted to constitute themselves as political bodies through self-fashioning.

Shell mounds ceased to be built in many parts of coastal northern Australia about 800–600 years ago. They are the subject of stories told by Aboriginal people and some have been incorporated in ritual and political activities during the last 150 years. These understandings emerged only after termination of the economic and environmental system that created them, 800–600 years ago, in a number of widely separated coastal regions. Modern stories and treatments of these mounds by Aboriginal people concern modern or near-modern practices. Modern views of the mounds, their mythological and ritual associations, may be explained by reference to the socioeconomic transitions seen in the archaeological record; but the recent cultural, social and symbolic statements about these places cannot inform us of the process or ideology concerned with the formation of the mounds. Many Aboriginal communities over the last half a millennium actively formed understandings of new landscapes and systems of land use. Attempts to impose historic ideologies and cosmologies on earlier times fail to acknowledge the magnitude and rate of economic and ideological change on the tropical coastline of Australia.

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.