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.

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’.

A San rock-art site in northeastern South Africa includes several intriguing features, including rubbed patches of pigment and a red line painted on top of a quartz vein. This article interrogates the relationships between hunter-gatherer beliefs, materiality and rock paintings, and suggests that San painters and viewers engaged with the unique Mpumalangan site for specific ritualistic purposes.

In this article, we look at two very different contexts of monument use – Bronze Age Inner Asia and the Classic period Maya lowlands – in order to explore the function and meanings of monuments and the variety of ways in which they worked to mark and differentiate ancient landscapes. Our goal in uniting such disparate contexts is to examine how power and social organization in these settings were translated into monumental material forms, and how such materializations were experienced by those who viewed and re-interpreted the monuments. In particular, we explore how monuments acted as orientational markers within specific cultural contexts. Our discussion finds common ground between the disparate settings through several common interpretive frameworks focused on spatial, temporal and social orientational work accomplished by active, agentive monuments through their relationships with humans, which we frame as a ‘technology of the monument’. Monuments are instrumental in situating groups within these different layers, or landscapes, of lived experience, yet even while physically fixed, allow for movement through changing meanings and ideas.

This paper addresses the motivations for producing the rare object stencils found in the rock art of western Arnhem Land. We present evidence for 84 stencils recorded as part of the Mirarr Gunwarddebim project in western Arnhem Land, northern Australia. Ranging from boomerangs to dilly bags, armlets and spearthrowers, this assemblage suggests something other than a common or ongoing culture practice of stencilling objects used in everyday life. Instead, we suggest that these stencils represent an entirely different function in rock art through a process of memorialization that was rare, opportunistic and highly selective.

This paper examines how monuments with ‘local’ idiosyncrasies are key in processes of place-making and how, through persistence, such places can engage in supra-local and even ‘global’ dynamics. Departing from a detailed revision of its context, materiality and iconography, we show how a remarkable Iberian ‘warrior’ stela brings together the geo-strategic potential of a unique site, located literally between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds, the century-long dialogue between shared and local identities and the power of connectivity of inexorable global processes. Previous approaches to Iberian late prehistoric stelae have had problems in developing bottom-up, theoretically informed and empirically sound approaches to their simultaneously local and supra-local character. The remarkable site of Almargen provides the opportunity to explore this issue. Located in Lands of Antequera (Málaga), a region with a strong tradition of landscape-making through monuments going back to the Late Neolithic, the Almargen ‘warrior’ stela serves us to explore the notion of ‘glocalization’, which embodies persistent local engagements with material culture, sites and landscapes on the one hand, and their connections with wider regional and even ‘global’ worlds on the other.

Rock-art researchers have long acknowledged the importance of discerning superimposition sequences as a means for exploring chronology. Despite their potential for reconstructing painting events and thus informing on a site's production sequences, the social significance of superimpositions and their associated meanings have been little explored. In the Kimberley Region of northwestern Australia, interpretations of superimpositions as an analytical lens have often lingered on the ‘negative’ connotations of this practice (e.g. to destroy supernatural power embedded in previous paintings and/or to show cultural dominance). As a result, it has been proposed that the overpainting of previous images was tantamount to defacing, leading to the proposition that new images constituted a form of vandalism of older art. In this paper, a sample of rock-art sites from the northwestern and northeastern Kimberley is analysed with the aim of grounding the study of superimpositions in more nuanced practices, leading researchers to contemplate the role they played among populations within the same area. It is argued here that superimpositions brought together past and present experiences that served to reinforce the links between contemporary art production and the inherited landscape.

The paper aims at providing theoretical models and data interpretation applied to multiple burials. Challenging the current fuzzy definition of multiple burials in ancient societies, the paper proposes a more accurate classification of multiple burials, with particular reference to ancient Egypt funerary culture, based on two main parameters, which may have influenced the association of bodies: p1) architecture; p2) time span, and three flexible sub-parameters that may be used to customize different scenarios, on occasion: sp1) number of deceased; sp2) age of deceased; sp3) nature of death/deposition. The body has been often considered the real ontological centre of the burial itself with all of the other countable objects intended as radiating projections supporting the body-nucleus. The practice of multiple burials disrupts such a perception as it juxtaposes horizontal, multidirectional perspectives: the role of a new body entering among older bodies and objects, and of the multiple bodies and objects themselves. The study of multiple burials, if correctly framed, can lead to insights into different religious, social, and economic reasons behind the mortuary programmes within a society. For instance, sequential multiple burials reinforce the transformation of dead bodies into part of the burial equipment itself, reducing the centrality of the body and disrupting the narrative tied to individual biographies, increasing an ‘artefactual’ perception.

In this paper we discuss the universal selection of exceptional materials for tool making in prehistory. The interpretation suggested in the literature for these non-standard materials is usually limited to a general statement, considering possible aesthetic values or a general, mostly unexplained, symbolic meaning. We discuss the implications of viewing these materials as active agents and living vital beings in Palaeolithic archaeology as attested in indigenous hunter-gatherer communities all around the world. We suggest that the use of specific materials in the Palaeolithic was meaningful, and beyond its possible ‘symbolic’ meaning, it reflects deep familiarity and complex relations of early humans with the world surrounding them—humans and other-than-human persons (animals, plants, water and stones)—on which they were dependent. We discuss the perception of tools and the materials from which they are made as reflecting relationships, respectful behaviour and functionality from an ontological point of view. In this spirit, we suggest re-viewing materials as reflecting social, cosmological and ontological world-views of Palaeolithic humans, and looking beyond their economic, functional aspects, as did, perhaps, our ancestors themselves.

This article evaluates defensive works at the ancient hilltop centre of Yayno, Pomabamba, north highlands, Peru. Survey, mapping and sampling excavations show that its primaryoccupation dates to cal. AD 400–800, by groups of the Recuay tradition. At the centre of a network articulating small nearby farming villages, Yayno features an impressive series of natural and built defensive strategies. These worked in concert to protect the community from outsiders and keep internal groups physically segregated. The fortifications are discussed in relation to local political organization and a martial aesthetic in northern Peru during the period. Recuay elite identity and monumentalism arose out of local corporate traditions of hilltop dwelling and defence. Although such traditions are now largely absent in contemporary patterns of settlement, an archaeology of warfare at Yayno has repercussions for local understandings of the past.

The Blackfoot bison hunters of the North American Plains are widely known for their artfully painted lodges commonly known as ‘tipis’. Traditionally, tipi designs were not for everyone; rather, they were received individually from the spirit world or ceremonially transferred from one person to another under strict covenants. Painted tipis advertised the spiritual and social stature of their owners and were intricately woven in the ontological fabric of the group. This article explores the role of the painted tipi in individual and social life among the Blackfoot to highlight how art can be used to construct social places, to accumulate material and ritual wealth and, ultimately, to make society.

This paper discusses the emergence of silver metallurgy some two millennia ago in the south central Andes. It is argued that the availability of multiple abundant resources and a high population density were instrumental in the development of this complex technology. The potential for such resource-rich environments to stimulate and sustain innovation is briefly discussed, particularly for prestige goods in societies engaged in socially competitive networks. The Puno Bay area of Lake Titicaca and its hinterland is shown to be one such resource-rich region, which may have contributed to its role in developing a complex and labour-intensive silver metallurgy as part of a larger mining-metallurgical landscape.

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.

In the search for cognition in the mute record of archaeology the record of ancient thought transmitted to us by early written texts is an obvious but underexploited resource. An examination of the classification of stones in Mesopotamia gives a rare opportunity to match textual information with the archaeological record, and offers some insights into the organization of thought and classification of knowledge by one of the first literate societies.A group of unshaped stones in the corner of a grave under the floor of a Sumerian dwelling attests to an awareness of natural properties as distinct from functions, whether or not these concepts were already formulated in words. The group of various stones also hints at the concept of a class, the first stirring of a mindset which percolates through Plato and Aristotle to Linnaeus. Already in c. 2000 BC the essential properties of some of these stones were conceptualized and described in a ‘literary’ composition, and the concept of a stable set of properties is linked to traditions relating to the proper source of a stone. Later still, maybe around 1000 BC, the Mesopotamian scribes created a lapidary or ‘Handbook of Stones’ which provides an ordered key to stones in respect of their appearance. Then, or later, the description of their appearance was supplemented by details in which their natural or physical properties were distinguished, along with magical properties some of which were probably transmitted to the Hellenistic world.

The principal factors influencing the location of the Old Kingdom pyramids in Egypt are reconsidered. The decisive factors influencing their distribution over an area of c. eighty kilometres were essentially of economic, geomorphologic, socio-political and unavoidably also of religious nature. Primary importance is to be attributed to the existence of the Old Kingdom capital of Egypt, Memphis, which was a central place with regard to the Old Kingdom pyramid fields. Its economic potential and primacy in the largely redistribution-driven state economy sustained construction of the vast majority of the pyramid complexes in its vicinity. The location of the remaining number of the Old Kingdom pyramids, including many of the largest ever built, is explained using primarily archaeological evidence. It is claimed that the major factors influencing their location lie in the sphere of general trends governing ancient Egyptian society of the period.

The origin of record keeping is a key question in the development of social complexity and specialized economies, representing the first step towards the emergence of written communication. Yet the precursors of the world's earliest writing and its initial stages of development remain little understood. Small, geometric clay objects (‘tokens’) appear in the tenth millennium cal. bc, the start of the Neolithic in West Asia, prevailing into the first millennium. It is largely assumed that from their inception clay objects played a crucial role in record keeping, directly evolving into the world's earliest known writing. Utilizing new and previously unpublished Neolithic data comprising almost individually studied 3000 objects, accompanied by information from 56 further Neolithic sites, this article investigates the meaning of Neolithic ‘tokens’. Analysis proves the basis of their predominant interpretation to be incorrect; clay objects appear earlier than previously recognized and are not a necessary component of Neolithic agro-pastoral villages. ‘Tokens’ were multi-functional artefacts; even within a single site clay objects performed multiple roles. Though likely used in simple counting activities, this was not limited to the accounting of agricultural produce. Nor was counting the sole function of clay objects in the Neolithic. Clay objects were not created to administer agricultural produce and there is no evidence to suggest that in the Neolithic they formed part of a unified symbolic system.

One of the strengths of the archaeological discipline is our ability to examine social transformations over the course of centuries or millennia. However, we rarely think about the ways in which temporal scale affects our interpretations of these processes. Transformative social changes look different when seen from the perspective of the longue durée, a human lifespan, or a single day. Although they clearly result from human actions, long-term, major social changes cannot be understood simply as additive concatenations of short-term shifts.