From the Norse sagas or the Arthurian cycles, we are used to the concept that the warrior's weapon has an identity, a name. In this article I shall ask whether some prehistoric weapons also had an identity. Using case studies of La Tène swords, early Iron Age central and southern Italian spearheads and middle and late Bronze Age type Boiu and type Sauerbrunn swords, I shall argue that prehistoric weapons could indeed have an identity and that this has important implications for their biographies, suggesting that they may have been conserved as heirlooms or exchanged as prestige gifts for much longer than is generally assumed, which in turn impacts our understanding of the deposition of weapons in tombs, where they may have had a ‘guardian spirit’ function.

After the collapse of most early states in the East around 1200 BC, parts of the western Mediterranean experienced technological progress and demographic rise, apparently without adapting forms of hierarchic political organization. A very good example is Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age nuragic Sardinia, which had been connected to eastern trade networks since Mycenaean times, and developed into one of the most important venues for culture contact and exchange in the West after 1200 BC. However, its rich archaeological record, including figurines, architecture, sanctuaries, villages and tombs, does neither indicate the existence of ‘elite’ groups, nor does it show any traces of a hierarchic society. This article examines the possibility that a non-hierarchical form of socio-political organization devoid of elites developed to a high level of cultural complexity and progress on the island. Other important aspects are the role of immigration as an integrant in nuragic society, considering comparable situations of non-hierarchic politics in ethnography and history, as well as theoretical approaches to forms of social organization. It is concluded that socio-economic development does not necessarily require a centralized political authority.

Spatial logics are guiding ideals for how space should be structured, as determined by the culturally embedded decisions of architects and builders. I test various spatial logics within sub-communities at the city of Copan, Honduras, to better understand principles behind the planning of paired groups. Results support a prevailing cosmological logic, in keeping with work on concepts of directionality, and particularly with the significance of north and salience of a north–south building axis. The anthropology of space and place has gained much from an increased reliance on archaeological literature, as well as the closely related fields of geography and empirical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyses. Because we shape and are shaped by landscapes, consideration of spatial relationships should help us evaluate and refine our conceptions of social relations.

This paper explores the potential of posthumanist feminism in archaeology. We find ourselves exhausted in the face of the continuing inequalities in our discipline and the volatile political times we live in, where discrimination and xenophobia, entangled with the patriarchy, create a toxic mix. In the face of this, we draw inspiration from ongoing activism within archaeology and the emergence of posthumanist feminism beyond archaeology. We consider the juxtaposition between activism in the discipline and the lack of engagement with the same issues in our theory. Posthumanist feminism is explored as a way to unite theory and activism. It connects to and builds on existing feminisms but is argued to differ in three ways: first, posthumanist feminism widens the scope of those for whom we should be working to achieve equality; second, it suggests radical shifts in our ontology are necessary to bring about equality; third, it develops an alternative approach to difference. We explore the potential for posthumanist feminism to reshape narratives about the past, the way we do archaeology, and archaeological activism. In each, the aim is to turn away from the majoritarian subject and to make space for multiple alternative voices to emerge and thrive in archaeology.

This paper provides a commentary on the other contributions to this special section. It offers an extended reflection on some emergent themes in this collection, themes which resonate with my own perspective on assemblage theory. Two issues in particular are addressed: typology and time.

The study of clay tokens in the Ancient Near East has focused, for the most part, on their role as antecedents to the cuneiform script. Starting with Pierre Amiet and Maurice Lambert in the 1960s the theory was put forward that tokens, or calculi, represent an early cognitive attempt at recording. This theory was taken up by Denise Schmandt-Besserat who studied a large diachronic corpus of Near Eastern tokens. Since then little has been written except in response to Schmandt-Besserat's writings. Most discussions of tokens have generally focused on the time period between the eighth and fourth millennium bc with the assumption that token use drops off as writing gains ground in administrative contexts. Now excavations in southeastern Turkey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe — the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital Tušhan — have uncovered a corpus of tokens dating to the first millennium bc. This is a significant new contribution to the documented material. These tokens are found in association with a range of other artefacts of administrative culture — tablets, dockets, sealings and weights — in a manner which indicates that they had cognitive value concurrent with the cuneiform writing system and suggests that tokens were an important tool in Neo-Assyrian imperial administration.

Research has recently resumed at Aksum, capital of a major state which flourished in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea during the early centuries ad. A wide-ranging investigation is planned into many aspects of Aksumite civilization. This paper summarizes results from the first season's work on the setting and symbolic meaning of the monumental stelae for which the site is justly famous, as well as on the technology which they illustrate. It is argued that the stelae were grave markers and that the tradition which they represent was substantially modified following the adoption of Christianity at Aksum in the fourth century.

Recently discovered sculpture fragments from the area surrounding the important but little-studied site of Telantunich confirm a regional tradition of human portraiture quite distinct from the better-known canon of Maya stelae. Comparative material presented here shows connections between this tradition and a regional emphasis on depictions of masculine sexuality, especially depictions of human phalli. The authors present an analysis of this corpus that confirms that such depictions both reflect Classic Maya conceptions of masculinity and were deployed to convey and reify such conceptions within society.

This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that ‘become’ in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife.

Recent literature has attempted to infer aspects of ‘mind’ from early tool production. It is suggested here that adoption of the modular view of cognition could provide an alternative and complementary approach to that which makes use of Piagetian developmental theory. The modular view, which is concerned with multiple intelligences, permits emphasis on the multiplicity of distinct features involved in spatial cognitive competence, and may provide greater descriptive resolution than is possible with Piagetian schemes. Using an integrated framework to analyze a later Lower Palaeolithic collection from Zhoukoudian, it is suggested that the hominid producers possessed a cognitive capacity for which no current analogue exists

Colour symbolism permeated the world of indigenous North America. This symbolism was often tied to the cosmos where the earth was viewed as a quadrilateral disk and each of the four cardinal directions was linked with a colour array such as red, white, black, and blue. We suggest that the recurring use of certain colours and colour contrasts comprised a suite of long-term historical practices that were essential for reproducing certain views about the world and about being in the world. Further, the rendering of colour had a plasticity that allowed it to enter a discourse about daily life that was intertwined with notions of the long-term. As a case study, we focus on well-known ceramic head effigies in the central Mississippi Valley to argue that their veneers of contrasting red and white were imbued with a notion of time immemorial that converged with other conceptions of temporality, most importantly, a pressing concern with regional violence, personal safety, and spiritual integrity.

Experiments in replicating facsimiles of Late Neolithic engraved slate plaques from southwestern Iberia suggest that variation related to fine-motor skills is greater between individual engravers than within the work of a single engraver. This implies that the work of different individuals producing certain classes of material culture may be distinguishable on the basis of repetitive, idiosyncratic traits. These studies also generate otherwise unobtainable information about the experience of plaque making. We examine past and present methodological attempts to differentiate unconscious, individual styles from intentional, culturally mediated styles, and discuss why in some cases it is extremely difficult to separate such variation. We explore the link between individual variation and theoretical notions of the individual, and its implications for understanding the organization, transmission, and shared expression of ancient social practices.

This article takes a critical look at claims that Landscape Phenomenology owes an ancestral debt to the work of early antiquarians; a belief that is in danger of becoming an orthodoxy through casual repetition. Through an exploration of the inherent tensions that arise when attempts are made to link pioneering empiricists (who in many senses embodied the Baconian experimental science of the seventeenth century) and Landscape Phenomenology (that positions itself in direct opposition to this enlightenment project) it is argued that rather than antiquarian practices pre-empting or anticipating those of Landscape Phenomenology, the nagging sense that the two are in some way connected derives from their shared reliance upon practices that are best described as chorographic.

Archaeological studies of the material and historical conditions of life have in recent years stimulated discussion of the relationality of people and material culture. Engagement with the material world is one context in which senses of personhood and identity emerge and are transformed. People and materiality are interanimated in the more or less transient events and actions of daily life. Personhood and the material world are loaded with sense and made meaningful through citation and reanimation of cultural values and tradition. This contribution discusses the contingent and possibly transient senses of personhood that may have been constituted in some specific material and historical circumstances relating to early Neolithic monuments in southern Britain. A case study focuses on the relationality of people, animals, earth, stone, architecture and material culture.

The distinction between clean and unclean, often associated with bodily functions, is a common feature of human societies. Consequently, diverse groups developed different ways of maintaining separation between the realms. Despite its prominence in many ethnographies and in anthropology at large, and although the spatial expression of this separation is susceptible to archaeological enquiry, the concept of purity had received less attention by archaeologists. The completion of the excavation of a large house at Tel ʿEton supplied us with detailed information on household life and practices in Iron Age Israel. The finds from this house, along with a very large archaeological dataset about Iron Age Israelite society at large and the wealth of textual data from this period, give us insights into the practices associated with purity/impurity. The article reconstructs how Iron Age Israelite society coped with the implications of impurity (mainly women during menstruation) in its daily life, how impurity was contained, and offers a reconstruction of the ritual that accompanied the change of status from impure to pure.

In southwest Asia, the emphasis on architecture and burial ritual, which was instrumental in the construction of place-bound identities during the Early Neolithic (c. 10,000–7000 cal. bc), shifted toward an emphasis on miniature portable objects, such as figurines, stamps and ceramics, during the Later Neolithic (c. 7000–5000 cal. bc). Through a focus on stamps, this article argues that the appearance and proliferation of image-bearing portable objects is related to a new understanding of identities around emergent concepts of ‘house’ and ‘community’, which reordered the terms of social affiliation as well as difference and hierarchy at various scales. In terms of an iconographical approach, stamp imagery shows some affinities with the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic themes of the Early Neolithic; however, the majority of the Later Neolithic stamp imagery is composed of highly abstract types that cannot immediately be associated with the themes of the Early Neolithic. A close examination would indicate that these abstract types were also reproduced by manipulating ancestral imagery. It would also appear that certain types of images were employed on certain types of objects, such as ceramics and figurines, in increasingly structured ways. Arguably, these seemingly different object classes are an outcome of a seamless historical discourse of raw materials, images and forms, continuously shifting the conceptualization of self and society. It is in this context that stamps may be treated as figurines of a highly abstract, highly crafted and highly standardized nature. While the clay figurines appropriated social identities in the domestic sphere, stamps and ceramics were instrumental in linking multiple scales of identity formation, from personal to communal. Reconsidering the material shift from the Early to Late Neolithic, I suggest that the spreading regulation of appropriating body and food was central in the construction of a convergent politics of reproduction around the concepts of ‘house’.

This article explores the relationship between human ontogeny — how people become who they are — and material change at the Bronze Age tell of Százhalombatta, Hungary. Shifts in domestic material culture and in the use of domestic space in houses imply altered developmental experiences for people living on the tell from the Early to Middle Bronze Age. These changes produced qualitatively different kinds of people at different points in time.