This study expands perceptions of ritual behaviour in the British Iron Age, which conventionally focus on the deposition and burial of objects. Classification of animal bones as special deposits in Iron Age Britain, and interpretation of the ritual activities they may represent, has tended to concentrate on the significance of their burial location and composition and/or the cultural perception of the particular animal species deposited. Other than for consumption and sacrifice, little consideration has been given to the complex, dynamic histories (biographies) and cultural significance of animal remains in the period between death and burial. Detailed examination of the taphonomic and pre-depositional histories of animal deposits, are one means by which it is possible to explore the activities that occurred above ground in the past. Zooarchaeological investigations of a group of cattle and horse skulls from Battlesbury Bowl, Hampshire, provide an excellent example of a ‘special deposit’ where it was the objects themselves, as much as their species, location or structured burial that held special significance for the Iron Age community. By taking a biographical approach, we can create detailed narratives of archaeological animal bones and their treatment, thereby expanding the view of activities that fall under the ‘ritual’ umbrella.

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.

The majority of large-scale enclosure walls constructed in Egypt in the second millennium bc were built around temples rather than towns. These walls were high and massive, sometimes with multiple enceintes, while details such as buttresses and crenellations appear to have related the design to contemporary defensive architecture. A libation basin from Memphis demonstrates clearly that a temple could be viewed as equivalent to a fortress by local inhabitants while the mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu was closely modelled on contemporary fortress construction. These enclosure walls often represent a very significant investment of resources but are difficult to explain as defensive. Unlike town walls, temple enclosures were not optional extras but were an essential part of the architecture of the shrine.

This paper utilizes Material Engagement Theory (MET), which examines material culture as a dynamic and integral component of human cognitive systems, in order to explore the relationship between Cycladic marble sculpting and the complex social organization evinced at the sites of Dhaskalio and Kavos on the island of Keros. The article shows how the development of Cycladic sculpting in conjunction with transforming settlement patterns suggests that the figurines emerged as part of a kinshipping dynamic. In this context, evidence from the cognitive sciences reveals how Cycladic figurines were profound attention-capturing technologies which shaped the development of intersubjectivity and collective activity. Cycladic marble provided a medium through which a semiotics of value could be generated, circulated and manipulated across the archipelago. The article argues that marble artefacts formed part of a distributed cognitive system which enabled the regional organization of long-range voyaging regimes centred on Dhaskalio-Kavos. The role of Cycladic sculpture in mediating maritime social interactions is clarified by examining the dynamics of social cognition and the organizational burdens of long-range voyaging culture. The relationship between marble, social interaction and longboat voyaging provides a strong explanation for the development and transformation of Keros as well as for broader chronological developments in the region. Cycladic sculpting traditions mediated the shifting burdens upon social cognition during the Early Bronze Age, facilitating the novel forms of social organization in the central Cyclades as a response to both the pressures and the opportunities of the Aegean world. Keros provides an exemplary case study of material culture's role in extending the boundaries of social cognition in ways that enable social complexity to emerge at new scales.

Present in the Trans-Pecos rock art of west Texas are many motifs intelligible within hunter-gatherer ontological frameworks. These motifs—including human figures missing heads and limbs, figures with disproportionately large eyes, polymelia and pilo-erection—are concerned with somatic transformations and distortions experienced in altered states of consciousness. Ethnographic analogies also demonstrate that other Trans-Pecos features—smearing, rubbing and chipping of pigment and incorporation of natural inequalities of the rock surfaces into images—are evidence of kinetic experiences or embodied processes, including the important interaction with the ‘veil’ that separates one tier of the cosmos from others. By exploring the related concepts of embodiment, somatic transformation and process within non-Western ontologies, I offer a unified but multi-component explanation for the meanings and motivations behind several Trans-Pecos rock-art motifs. I also address the consumption of rock art in west Texas—how it was viewed and used by the original artists and subsequent viewers to shape, maintain and challenge ideologies and identities.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that complex structures in the natural and cultural worlds emerge from two types of design. Bottom-up design involves the rote action of a simple algorithm in an environment constrained by physical laws. Top-down design involves deliberation and planning, and is unique to modern humans. Identifying the emergence of top-down design in the hominin lineage is an important research challenge, and the archaeological record of stone technology is our best evidence for it. A current view is that artefact types and flaking methods increased in complexity from 3.3 to c. 0.3 million years ago, reflecting improving capacities at spatial cognition and working memory, culminating in top-down design perhaps as early as 1.75 million years ago. Recent experimental work, however, has shown that a simple ‘remove flake’ algorithm constrained by the laws of fracture mechanics—a form of bottom-up design—can produce stone tool attributes thought to be evidence of top-down design. Here, these models are reviewed and critiqued in light of the new experimental evidence. A revised working memory-based model, focusing on the recursive aspects of stone flaking, is proposed.

The development of social hierarchy during the European Late Neolithic and Bronze Age is often taken for granted in the literature. The Bell Beaker culture has been given a primary role in this picture as it would correspond to the large-scale diffusion of prestige goods and associated individualistic values. On the basis of the French Midi sequence, this article seeks to demonstrate that the prestige model rests upon a simplistic and abstract perception of the data. Rather than the climax of social competition, the Bell Beaker culture marks the building of new fluid social networks which allowed better circulation of knowledge and people.

Outcrops of metallic mineralization were potentially prominent locations in past landscapes, the characteristics of their constituent minerals granting them distinctive appearances and properties. To date, most treatments have cast humans as exploiters whose prime motivation for engagement with the mineral world was the acquisition of metals. This article examines new evidence for Early Bronze Age activity at Roman Lode, a predominantly iron-rich ore deposit on Exmoor in southwest Britain. In addition to assessing whether this represents metal exploitation, other interpretive avenues are explored including the potential role of the site as a provider of other resources such as pigments and quartz and as an element in a wider conceptual and physical landscape. A layered approach to the interpretation of such sites is advocated. Only by combining a cognitive interpretation with materialist perspectives will we arrive at a more insightful understanding of the past significance of minerals, mining and landscape.

Whereas in Europe the transition from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic and the replacement of Neanderthal by anatomically modern humans appear to be synchronous events, in Africa this is not the case. Neanderthals as such were not present in Africa, and if the ‘Out of Africa’ model is correct, the ancestors of anatomically modern humans must have made their appearance in a Middle Stone Age context before 100,000 years ago. Subsequently, it seems that they coexisted with Neanderthals for up to 70,000 years in the Near East. If a direct biological correlation can be ruled out, the question arises: what was the impetus for an Upper Palaeolithic ‘revolution’ and why should it have taken place at all?

This article focuses on the early coinage of the Akhaian cities of South Italy — Sybaris, Kroton, Metapontion, Kaulonia, Poseidonia — against the backdrop of colonization. Minting an early and distinctive series of coins, these centres were issuing coinage well before their ‘mother-cities’, a phenomenon that has never been fully appreciated. With its origins in a colonial context, the Akhaian coinage of Magna Graecia not only differs from that of the early coin-minting states of the Greek mainland, it offers a case study that challenges long-held assumptions and potentially contributes to a better understanding of the origins of coinage. It does so by suggesting that coinage is much more than a symbol of authority and represents considerably more than just an abstract notion of sovereignty or hegemony. The images or emblems that the Akhaians of South Italy chose for their coins are those current in the contemporary cultural landscape of the historic Akhaians, but at the same time actively recall the world of the heroic Akhaians of the Bronze Age by referring to prehistoric measures of value. More than his, the vicissitudes of colonial and indigenous history in parts of South Italy in the Archaic period were not merely reflected in coinage, the coins themselves were central to the processes of transformation. By boldly minting — constructing — their identity on coinage, the Akhaians of South Italy chose money in order to create relations of dominance and to produce social orders that had not existed before.

The materiality of ritual performance is a growing focus for archaeologists. In Europe, collective ritual performance is expected to be highly structured and to leave behind a loud archaeological signature. In Australia and Papua New Guinea, ritual is highly structured; however, material signatures for performance are not always apparent, with ritual frequently bound up in the surrounding natural and cultural landscape. One way of assessing long-term ritual in this context is by using archaeology to historicize ethno-historical and ethnographic accounts. Examples of this in the Torres Strait region, islands between Papua New Guinea and mainland Australia, suggest that ritual activities were materially inscribed at kod sites (ceremonial men's meeting places) through distribution of clan fireplaces, mounds of stone/bone and shell. This paper examines the structure of Torres Strait ritual for a site ethnographically reputed to be the ancestral kod of the Mabuyag Islanders. Intra-site partitioning of ritual performance is interpreted using ethnography, rock art and the divergent distribution of surface and sub-surface materials (including microscopic analysis of dugong bone and lithic material) across the site. Finally, it discusses the materiality of ritual at a boundary zone between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and the extent to which archaeology provides evidence for Islander negotiation through ceremony of external incursions.

This paper proposes a multi-disciplinary approach which can be used to identify captives and the enslaved of Iron Age Britain (seventh century bc–ad first century). It uses a ‘poetics of violence’ perspective which recognizes that violence and warfare are created and enacted through social relations, and encompasses violence for which there is often no archaeological trace. Roman primary sources, bog-bodies and other archaeological evidence from Iron Age Britain and Europe suggest that people in these states of ‘social death’ were used to acquire material goods, employed in the agricultural economy, and their deaths played an important role in episodes of ritual violence. Drawing on research from North America, a series of funerary, isotope, archaeothantology and osteological variables have been identified for this period, and when integrated into an osteobiography, allows for the re-interpretation of many burials and structured deposits encountered in Iron Age settlements and hillforts.

In this paper, we examine a Terminal Formative-period (150 bc–ad 250) bundled offering from the site of Cerro de la Virgen, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The offering was emplaced below a prominent public building in the site's ceremonial centre and contained five stone objects, including a rain deity mask, a fragment of a second mask, a figurine of a deceased ancestor and two miniature table altars, as well as nine small ceramic vessels. Considered together as a ‘sacred bundle’, the stone objects collectively reference agricultural fertility, rulership and ancestor veneration, which we interpret to be a metaphorical invocation of a fundamental tenet of prehispanic Mesoamerican religious belief—the sacred covenant. The offering also played an active part in founding the community of Cerro de la Virgen, connecting its residents with the divine, the ancestors and the outside world and constituting differences in status among its members.

For more than a hundred years the three colossal limestone figures from Coptos have challenged anyone wishing to write on the development of culture and society in early Egypt. Beginning from a fuller documentation of the three, a reconstruction of their original context is proposed, namely, an array of standing stones, a type of sacred structure of which a growing number of examples are known in the region. A study of the signs carved on their sides answers recent speculations that they record the names of early kings. Both the colossi and the system of symbols to which the signs belong represent a culture which, in consequence of a thoroughgoing ancient process of redefinition, was subsequently overlaid by the significantly different culture of Pharaonic Egypt.

This article discusses the identity of the people buried in the Great Death Pit PG 1237, a mass grave of the Royal Cemetery of Ur, and the ways they died and entered the shaft. Admittedly, the evidence required to positively solve the many taphonomic and osteological questions involved does not exist, because of the way the site was excavated and published in the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, the original excavators’ skill and unquestioned care in mapping and recording still prepares the ground for new alternative interpretations. As the ‘Rams Caught in a Thicket’ (two statuettes found in the mass grave) may have been the front parts of lyres, and almost all the dead might have entered the shaft impersonating musicians, singers and dancers, the paramount importance of music in the funerals of Sumerian elites is emphasized. New radiographic evidence recently suggested that some of the buried persons were killed violently, refuting the traditional theory of a voluntary mass suicide by poison. The bodies of the victims might have been formally prepared and serially brought to the pit in burial groups. Stratigraphy and spatial distribution reveal consistent depositional patterns dictated by specific rituals, as already proposed on the basis of more limited evidence by other authors. Formal arrangement and ritualism, in turn, support Woolley's identification of the graves as sacred constructions and thus reaffirms their royal character. The article ends by considering the historical meaning of the nature of these impressive funerals at the verge of the political unification of Mesopotamia by the house of Sargon.

Drawn by their foundation in fundamentally ‘otherwise’ posthuman ethical and moral worlds, archaeologists have in recent years employed a number of indigenous theories to interpret archaeological materials. In this paper I consider the potential of New Zealand Maori whakapapa, loosely and reductively translatable as genealogy or ancestry, to become a strand of general theory in archaeology. The qualities of whakapapa which I feel have particular potential are its moral and ethical embeddedness and its insistence on multiple forms of relating. Importantly, whakapapa has an accessible indigenous voice. There is an extensive published literature, both Maori and non-Maori, academic and general, discussing, interpreting and applying Maori social theory, including whakapapa. In addition, whakapapa remains today fundamental to everyday and ceremonial Maori life. It is lived. Employing whakapapa as archaeological theory does not, then, depend on a having a specific authoritative interpreter. Here I have taken recent work by installation artist Maureen Lander as a forum to outline the key principles of whakapapa and to inform my discussion of whakapapa as archaeological theory.

In Ireland the supernatural sí (loosely translated as ‘fairies’) were strongly associated with thousands of archaeological monuments and natural places in the landscape, and many prehistoric artefacts were regarded as material culture of the sí. Such artefacts assumed an important role in popular religious practices, folk medicine and magic, most frequently to invoke cures for farm animals, but also to protect the homestead. Though little discussed in archaeological literature, the interpretation of prehistoric artefacts as potent objects from the supernatural world, and their ability actively to influence the well-being of livestock and the household, illustrates the rich and complex lives many archaeological artefacts assumed several thousand years after their initial manufacture, use and discard. The folk use of such artefacts as active agencies contrasts with the contemporaneous antiquarian collection and display of archaeological material as relics of ancient cultures.