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.

This article supplements current dialogue on the archaeology of slavery, offering an Indian Ocean counterpoint to a topic that has largely focused on the Atlantic world. It also delves into the essentially uncharted domain of the archaeology of indentured labour. New plural societies, characterized by cultural hybridity, were created around the world as a consequence of labour diasporas in the late historic period. What do these societies look like during the process of nation building and after independence? Can we study this development through archaeology? Focusing on Mauritius, this paper discusses the complexities of the island, and how it can be representative of similar newly formed plural societies in the Indian Ocean. During French and British imperial rule, the island served as an important trading post for a range of European imperial powers. These varied groups initiated the movement and settlement of African, Indian and Chinese transplanted communities. By exploring the dynamic nature of inter-group interaction on Mauritius, this paper emphasizes the nuanced nature of how different peoples arrived and made the island their home. Mauritius played a vital role in the transportation of forced and free labour, both within and beyond this oceanic world, and offers an important viewpoint from which to survey the ways in which historical archaeology can improve our understanding of the broader archaeo-historical processes of which these diasporas were an integral feature. The paper focuses on the outcomes of settlement, as viewed through the complex practices that underpin local food culture, the use and development of language and the way materials are employed for the expression of identity. The article also traces the roots of contemporary cultural retention for indentured labourers to administrative decisions made by the British, and ultimately explores how heritage and language can provide a powerful lens on mechanisms of cultural expression. In addition to illustrating the nuanced and multifaceted nature of group interaction on Mauritius itself, this article raises an issue of broader relevance—the need for historical archaeologists to give greater consideration to the Indian Ocean, rather than focusing on the Atlantic world. This would allow us to achieve a more informed understanding of European slave trading and associated systems of labour migration within a more global framework.

Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situated nature of our species’ existence, outside traditional dichotomies like culture and nature, mind and body, person and environment, and so on. From animal studies (e.g. Despret 2016; Wolfe 2009), via a rekindled attention to the material world (Coole & Frost 2010) to the cutting edge of quantum physics (Barad 2007), Posthumanism draws on a diverse range of inspiration (Ferrando 2019). This diversity also covers a significant internal dissonance and difference, with some posthumanists taking relational approaches, others arguing for the essential qualities of things, some focusing primarily on material things without humans and others calling for explicitly feminist investigations.

The gesture-call practices of early hominids were of a different order from those of their primate relatives, the ancestors of present day apes. The Tool-Cue Model postulates how our ancestors might have used tools both as functional instruments and as icons. The central thesis of the model treats communication as action systems mediated by signs, the central communicative action being the action cue: a communicative act that requires further behaviours to be satisfied. Tools are interpreted as framing devices, promoting the emergence of pragmatic/semantic duality. This latter feature is based on grammatical structures that include pragmatic and semantic meanings in the same utterance. Human language, i.e. symbolic pragmatics, appropriated the action cue meaning of tools and, simultaneously, transformed tools into symbolic ‘warrants’ by which modern humans transform both their speech and material behaviours into the types of social activities we intend. Post-Oldowan Lower and Middle Pleistocene lithics serve as empirical evidence in support of the Tool-Cue Model.

It is proposed here that the archaeological evidence for the emergence of ‘modern behaviour’ (160,000–40,000 bp) can best be explained as the rise of cognitive variation within populations through social mechanisms for integrating ‘different minds’, rather than by the development of a single ‘modern human mind’. Autism and the autistic spectrum within human populations are used as an example of ‘different minds’ which when integrated within society can confer various selective benefits. It is proposed that social mechanisms for incorporating autistic difference are visible in the archaeological record and that these develop sporadically from 160,000 years bp in association with evidence for their consequences in terms of technological innovations, improved efficiency in technological and natural spheres and innovative thinking. Whilst other explanations for the emergence of modern human behaviour may also contribute to observed changes, it is argued that the incorporation of cognitive differences played a significant role in the technological, social and symbolic expression of ‘modern’ behaviour.

Together, the concepts of heterarchy and collective action offer potential explanations for how early state societies may have established high degrees of civic coordination and sophisticated craft industries in the absence of exclusionary political strategies or dominant centralized political hierarchies. The Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 bc) appears to have been heterarchical, which raises critical questions about how its infrastructure facilitated collective action. Digital re-visitation of early excavation reports provides a powerful means of re-examining the nuances of the resulting datasets and the old interpretations offered to explain them. In an early report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilization's largest city, Ernest Mackay described a pair of small non-residential structures at a major street intersection as a ‘hostel’ and ‘office’ for the ‘city fathers’. In this article, Mackay's interpretation that these structures had a public orientation is tested using a geographical information systems approach (GIS) and 3D models derived from plans and descriptions in his report. In addition to supporting aspects of Mackay's interpretation, the resulting analysis indicates that Mohenjo-daro's architecture changed through time, increasingly favouring smaller houses and public structures. Close examination of these small public structures also suggests that they may at times have been part of a single complex.

The contents of a pit located in the centre of a large communal structure at Asiab in the central Zagros mountains provides rare evidence for ritual food practices during the Early Neolithic (~9660–9300 cal. bc). This pit contained the skulls of at least 19 wild boars carefully placed inside and subsequently sealed. Antler from red deer and the skull of a brown bear were also concealed within the pit. The boars included both male and female animals varying in age and some of the larger canines were deliberately removed. Such a unique collection of remains is unlikely to be the result of day-to-day activities; instead, this represents a group of ritually interred bones. This new evidence strengthens views that activities reinforcing social cohesion were important as human society was approaching a juncture leading towards agricultural subsistence strategies.

Elaborate urban gardens and parks played key roles in social competition, imperial and primordial symbolism, and public amenity access. Comparative data from 19 societies or cultural traditions indicate the varied content, activities, and contexts of elaborate (and sometimes ordinary) urban gardens and parks in pre-modern states and empires. Despite sparse economic characterizations, investments in them often represented a horizontal grandeur rivalling palatial and monumental construction. Investments in and access to urban parks and gardens are intimately related to the political economy and governance.

Post-mortem manipulations of the body were common at Mesolithic–Neolithic sites along the Danube River. During assessment of disarticulated human remains from Lepenski Vir, an unusual set of incisions (notches) were observed on the diaphysis of a human left radius along with a few cut-marks. Very few studies have attempted to distinguish clearly the characteristics of these modifications. All incisions were examined using a Scanning Electron Microscope and a Focus Variation Microscope that generated measurable three-dimensional digital models. Our results indicate that, on the basis of their micro-morphometric features, qualitative and quantitative distinctions can be made between cut-marks and notches, a methodology which can be applied to other engraved bones. Cut-marks, accidentally produced during flesh removal, were more irregular, longer, narrower and shallower than the notches. The notches, produced by a ‘nick and slice’ motion (pressure was applied to the bone, then the tool was pulled in one direction), were deliberately engraved. This engraved human bone is a rare example within a Prehistoric European context, possibly a form of notation, marking or counting a series of (important) events.

Çatalhöyük and other Near Eastern Neolithic ‘megasites’ are commonly interpreted as exceptional because of their large size and early dates. In this paper, we question exceptional claims about the size and social organization of megasites like Çatalhöyük by comparing them to pueblos in the American Southwest. We argue that Çatalhöyük and other Near Eastern Neolithic megasites are better understood as large villages whose size, layout and social organization compare readily to many of the late prehispanic and historic-period pueblos in the American Southwest. We suggest that four factors contribute to disparate interpretations of structurally similar sites in the Near East and American Southwest: 1) surface architectural visibility; 2) different regional intellectual traditions that emphasize ‘micro’ versus ‘macro’ scale social organization; 3) a tendency toward overestimation in archaeological population estimates, especially when the ‘biggest’ or the ‘earliest’ sites are involved; and 4) perceptions of continuity with later time periods.

Decorated clay stamps carrying a culturally filtered range of abstract designs are one of the most visually striking but problematic categories of portable art found at Neolithic and Copper Age sites in western Asia and southern Europe. This article proposes a revised account of their production, consumption and changing values across space and time, by emphasizing their biographies, human relations and cultural embeddedness. They were sometimes worn as amulets, but primarily designed to be hand-held printing and impressing tools, used to reproduce copies of powerful graphic images on the surface of other cultural materials. It is argued that their potent signatures repeatedly attached, revealed and reproduced significant cultural concepts and relations across different people and practices and across the material and supernatural worlds.

This article presents an experiment in time series analysis, specifically the Rayleigh Test, applied to the ancient Egyptian calendars of lucky and unlucky days recorded in papyri P. Cairo 86637, P. BM 10474 and P. Sallier IV. The Rayleigh Test is used to determine whether the lucky and unlucky days are distributed randomly within the year, or whether they exhibit periodicity. The results of the analysis show beyond doubt that some of the lucky days were distributed according to a lunar calendar. The cycles of the moon thus played an important role in the religious thinking of the Egyptians. Other periods found using the Rayleigh Test are connected to the civil calendar, the mythological symbolism of the twelfth hour of the day and possibly the period of variation of the star Algol.

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.

Can archaeology make sense of art ‘after interpretation’? Post-human scholarship suggests that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with representation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an adequate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that we can by building on Eduardo Kohn's thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life's animating processes, is form-taking and form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process of emergence through which novel ‘reals’—including societies and selves—are produced. Extending Sahlins’ definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning—the making of relatives—and its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

While the greater part of recent theoretical discourse within archaeology and anthropology has revolved around the post-modernist manifesto, selectionist metaphysics have been enjoying a milder and less vociferous resurgence. This is reflected in the increasing number and diversity of neo-Darwinian approaches which are now available within cultural fields of enquiry. Two basic approaches may be identified, Sociobiology and Cultural Selectionism, and the latter of these can be further sub-divided into the ‘American’ or ‘Inclusive Phenotype’ position and the ‘Cultural Virus’ position. This paper presents a critique of the more established ‘Inclusive Phenotype’ position from the point of view of the ‘Virus’ position, and as the critique unfolds a number of logical problems are elucidated. It is stressed that this paper is not so much a presentation of the Cultural Virus Theory, as a critique of its nearest philosophical relatives.

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.

The concept of aesthetics has long been marginalized in archaeology. It was originally formulated in the eighteenth century as part of an appreciation of Greek art and was fundamentally concerned with appreciating a quasi-universal idea of beauty; and as archaeologists and anthropologists recognized the distortion created by applying it to material from non-Western and pre-modern art, it fell into disfavour. An alternative anthropological approach pioneered by Howard Morphy regards aesthetics as the study of the affects of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties; this converges with the emerging philosophical study of ‘everyday aesthetics’. This article explores how archaeologists could apply these concepts, particularly through a study of Maltese Neolithic everyday aesthetics.

The cairns at Balnuaran of Clava show a structural relationship to the annual cycle, most clearly in their alignment on Midwinter sunset. The stones used in their construction fall into simple colour classes: ‘red’, ‘white’ and ‘black’. All three, but especially the black, appear to show selective arrangement in the cairns. A preliminary study of the relationships between the position of coloured stones and certain solar alignments, using both direct opposition and shadow casting, indicates that choice of colour may have been a significant factor in the positioning of stones within the monuments. Moreover the three colours seem to show a consistent pattern of meaning across a wide spectrum of cultures, which may imply a universal psychological factor in their symbolic use.