The days are long gone when archaeologists would automatically interpret any major prehistoric monument as evidence of a hierarchically organized society. Faced with a Stonehenge or a Silbury Hill, the evident deployment of large labour forces might naturally lead to thoughts of social élites and stratified societies. The task facing archaeologists today, however, is to interpret such monuments not as programmatic products of parallel social processes but as elements in unique and dynamic configurations of social, political and ideological interactions. This is the approach which the present volume seeks to exemplify, taking as its focus the famous site of Cahokia in the Mississippi valley. Cahokia itself is the greatest monument complex of prehistoric North America, marked by 120 mounds spread over an area of 13 square kilometres across the Mississippi river from the modern city of St Louis. During the twelfth century AD this was a settlement with a population estimated to have numbered in the thousands if not tens of thousands. What does such a phenomenon represent in social and political terms?

In this book, Thomas Emerson considers not just the monuments of Cahokia themselves but the evidence for ideology and the power relationships which might have supported a hierarchical society, and the mechanisms which may have connected Cahokia with its rural hinterland. The wealth of detailed information available from the sites in and around Cahokia — some of them excavated by Emerson himself — allows a detailed analysis at a level which is rarely possible in archaeological cases of this kind. Drawing on concepts of individual agency, power and ideology as forces for social change, Emerson interprets the rise of Cahokia as the successful manipulation of ideology by élites, an ideology in which the subordinate layers of society are compelled to participate.

Emerson's study raises key questions about the rise and fall of complex societies, and the role of ideology and agency in that process. That these questions remain open to debate, the contributions to this review feature amply demonstrate. How hierarchical was Cahokia, how effective was élite ideology, and, above all, how can we go about analyzing this kind of question from the archaeological evidence? The results have a bearing on archaeological interpretation at the very broadest level.

Animals were central elements in many early state political economies. Yet the roles of livestock in building and financing the state generally remain under-theorized, particularly in comparison with other major elements such as crop intensification and bureaucratic technologies. We compare the political economies of two highly centralized and expansive states—the Inca in the central Andes and Ur III in southern Mesopotamia—through a deliberately animal-focused perspective that draws attention to the unique social and economic roles of the livestock that underpinned both imperial financing and household resilience. Despite important differences in the trajectories of the two case studies, attention to the roles played by animals in early states highlights several underlying dynamics of broader interest including the translation between modes of production and accumulation, the interplay between animal-based mobilities and territorial integration, and the functions of livestock in state regimes of value and political subjectivity.

Photography has been a particularly important though often under-theorized aspect of archaeological research. Although seemingly simple representations, photographs are simultaneously objective and subjective, truthful and creative. This article considers the contradictory nature of photography generally and the specific relationship between photography and archaeology. It then looks at the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and examines how individuals have photographed ancient Maya sites, architecture and artifacts from the mid nineteenth century to the present. Initially used to support diffusionist theories of Maya origins, photography was later understood as a neutral and scientific way to record the Maya past. More recently, it has been used to share power more equitably with local communities and to make archaeology a more inclusive and relevant endeavour. Indeed, several have demonstrated that photography is a useful tool for engaged archaeology. This article argues that the reverse is also true: insights from engaged archaeology are useful tools for archaeological photography generally. By making photographic choices explicit and by including people and other aspects of the contemporary world in their photographs, scholars can emphasize that archaeology is a decisively human and necessarily political endeavour, and that archaeological sites and artifacts are dynamic and efficacious parts of the contemporary world.

Asking the public to question the assumption that our current systems of governance and food production represent the apex of an evolutionary trajectory is timely and well warranted.

In this paper, we seek to explore the ways in which landscapes become venues not only for manipulations of the past in a present, but also for shaping possible futures. Considerations of temporality and being in the landscape have been more strongly focused on the past and social memory than the future, anticipation and projectivity, but these are vital considerations if we are to preserve the possibility that past people imagined alternative futures. A fruitful archaeological context for an exploration of past futures can be found in the choices people made during the late Iron Age and Roman period in Britain, which has an increasingly rich and high-resolution material record for complex changes and continuities during a period of cultural interactions and imperial power dynamics. More specifically, recent research into the architectural and material practices evident on rural settlement sites and across landscapes forces us to challenge preconceptions about the reactive/reactionary culture of rural societies. Case-studies from Kent and the West Country will be deployed to develop the argument that in the materializing of time, the future has a very significant part to play.

Architectural reuse was common in ancient Egypt. Modern interpretations of this practice, particularly in royal contexts, usually ascribe it either a practical or ideological function, only rarely considering it possible that different motivations were involved. This type of approach is particularly true for the reuse of Old Kingdom blocks by the Middle Kingdom king Amenemhat I in his pyramid at Lisht, a case often classified as solely utilitarian. However, an approach that prioritizes not only the ancient Egyptian worldview and royal ideology, but also how this case of reuse fits into cross-cultural considerations of monumentality, demonstrates the necessity to look at this practice more holistically. This study focuses in particular on the possibility that the transportation of reused materials by Amenemhat I was a spectacle of construction used to showcase the king's legitimacy and authority at the start of a new dynasty.

We print here the text of the Sixth McDonald Lecture, which Dr Jean Clottes delivered in Cambridge in November 1995. Dr Clottes is well-known as a leading figure in the study of Palaeolithic art, and has been closely involved with the recent discoveries at the Grotte Cosquer and Grotte Chauvet. In this article he discusses the key trends and advances in this field.

Of the diverse approaches to understanding patterns and processes in human evolution, a focus on the biology of behaviour using principles derived from the non-human primates may have some utility for archaeologists. This article seeks to outline some biologically-based areas that could prove fruitful in exploring the origins of human behaviour within the archaeological record. It attempts to initiate a dialogue between biologists, even with their limited understanding of the problems facing those working with human origins, and archaeologists, in the hope that this dialogue will move beyond a simple reductionist approach towards the goal of integrating behaviour into a more sophisticated biological perspective.

Education is notoriously difficult to identify archaeologically, but crucial for understanding the inner workings of any society. Strikingly, in Mesoamerican archaeology, more seems to be known about the transmission of crafting skills than about practices of statecraft. Elsewhere in the ancient world, much evidence speaks to various social and institutional contexts in which specialized knowledge of histories, literacies, civics, and sciences was generated and taught as vital to state-making projects. Yet these same contexts among the Classic Period Maya (ad 200–900) remain poorly understood and under-theorized. Pulling from comparative research alongside recent work at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, this article explores how educational systems may have worked in Classic-era Maya polities—assessing evidence for educational loci, the different forms that education might assume, and the varied curricula that likely existed across different cities and particular demographics. Through this discussion, I seek to shed some light on the actors, gendered exclusions and diverse arrangements of pedagogy in Maya society, and grant further insight into how specialized bodies of knowledge (transmitted within formal educational institutions) were built into the very fabric of the Classic Maya states of which they were part.

Given current interests in indigenous ontologies and multiple worldviews, archaeologists drawing on textual evidence must more fully contextualize ancient texts according to how they were perceived and experienced, and understood as capable, in the cultures that created them. This endeavour has methodological impacts for modern interpretations, shifting how we interpret textual evidence as a result of how written realities and histories might have been conceptualized in the past. I examine these topics through the case study of the Classic Maya (250–900 ad, Mexico and Central America), using imagery on painted ceramic vessels. I examine how the Classic Maya understood text and writing, asking: how were texts perceived? How did people relate to them? What capabilities were texts understood to have? Based on observations gleaned from the ways in which glyphs are shown, the ways people are shown interacting with them and the work that glyphs apparently accomplish, I argue that the Classic Maya understood texts to be real, relational and persistent. This article suggests a new direction for archaeological thinking about ancient written sources, complementary to other interpretive approaches to texts, by exploring productive possibilities that emerge when we take ancient experiential perspectives into account.

How people have classified things is one of the defining aspects of cognitive archaeology. Here we have been looking at the most obvious physical manifestations of protection, namely large enclosure walls.

The aim of this article is to investigate the sight, sound, smell and touch of different cloth types in the Late Ertebølle of southern Scandinavia and to argue that such an approach provides stimulating new insights into an area of material culture that has previously been studied by archaeologists in a highly empirical manner. The archaeological evidence drawn together in this article points to this as a time when furs and skin products were of prime importance and plant fibres were the basis for knotted nets, looped cloth and basketry. In the archaeological literature these cloth types are usually treated separately and described according to the species of raw materials, such as pine marten fur, or the technology of their production, such as couched button-hole stitch. Using an experiment where participants are asked to handle modern cloth types and answer structured questionnaires, it is possible to create a sensory description of these cloth types. These descriptive results are then used to reconsider aspects of cloth and clothing in the Late Ertebølle of southern Scandinavia. By moving from the standard technological description to a sensory description, the Mesolithic cloth types investigated in this article are placed within a sensory and phenomenological theoretical framework. The presentation of these results seeks to provide a new description of these materials and allow archaeologists to revaluate the culturally-embedded nature of cloth and clothing at that time.

In the archaeology of death and burial, the premise that the dead were buried ritually and not simply disposed of seems to be accepted without argument. Where graves were reopened and reused for subsequent burials, however, the post-funeral manipulation of ‘older’ depositions is often regarded as having been primarily pragmatic and circumstantial. Countering this interpretative imbalance, we argue that the reuse of tombs was a highly complex procedure that forced communities into negotiating and formalizing, or even ritualizing, the way in which bodies and objects were acted on and engaged with. Taking the necropolis Giarnera Piccola/Ascoli Satriano in pre-Roman northern Apulia as a case study, and employing a microarchaeological-archaeothanatological perspective, we discuss the diverse and sometimes conflicting practices used to deal with pre-existing graves, objects and human remains, identifying tensions between maintaining or reconstructing the integrity of the body and intentionally manipulating and fragmenting it. We argue that repeatedly reused tombs constituted a socially and symbolically charged arena for a prolonged, active relationship with the deceased and for mobilizing, mediating and maintaining inter-generational memories.

While Marcel Mauss's landmark essay on The Gift has been vital in social anthropology, inspiring a vast and influential secondary literature, the gift has been much less prominent in archaeological interpretation. This study considers evidence for an ancient Andean gift economy, a system of reciprocal exchanges focused on making people and ensuring group social relations, rather than accumulating wealth/capital. Excavations at Yayno (north highlands, Ancash, Peru) revealed two features dating to the time of the Inkas: 1) a slab-lined cist burial; and 2) an offering deposit containing abundant long-distance trade and sumptuary items. Besides its mountaintop location, the burial's intrusive character and foreign items indicate that the offerings were made to propitiate the place, ruins and their divine aspect. This essay studies the reciprocal acts that led to the offerings, comparing them to gifting patterns in Inka human sacrifices known as capac hucha. The key actors in the exchange were children, divinities, Inka bureaucrats, local leaders and state subjects.

In this paper, we discuss observations from fieldwork in northern Kenya which revealed solid evidence for a vital ongoing rock art tradition among warriors of Samburu—lmurran. They make rock art during their lives as warriors, typically between the ages of 15 and 30, when they live away from their villages, herding cattle and thus representing a specific ‘community of practice’. Our findings reveal that Samburu rock art is made predominantly as a leisure occupation, while camping in shelters, as part of activities also involving the preparation of food. Typical images include domestic animals, humans (both men and women) and occasionally wild animals such as elephants and rhinos. Each age-set and new generation of lmurran is inspired by previous artwork, but they also change the tradition slightly by adding new elements, such as the recent tradition of writing letters and names close to the images. We conclude that even though rock art as such is not part of any ritual or ceremonial setting, it plays an important role as an inter-generational visual culture that transfers a common ongoing cultural engendered warrior identity through time.

Mortuary rituals are conservative and transformative. As practices of hands-on and conceptual learning, memory making, and inter-generational knowledge transfer they take place within Communities of Practice, where emotionality and temporalities shape learning about death, interment, and commemoration. Drawing on mortuary, ethnographic, and archaeothanatological evidence, this paper explores how inhabitants of the provincial Tiwanaku site Omo M10 (eighth–twelfth centuries ce) in southern Peru experienced and learned death and burial. The reconstruction of three stages of funerary ritual—body preparation, interment, and remembering—represents distinct episodes of bundling. During each stage, increasingly more diverse participants, materials, spaces, and activities differentially shape episodic memory formation and knowledge transfer. I propose that coming to understand the constituent participants, practices, and knowledge of mortuary ritual as emergent and heterogeneous Communities of Practice has important implications for the interpretation of synchronic and diachronic mortuary variability.

This article examines how landscape modification was key to the development of an urbanizing society within a valley in Chiapas, Mexico. The Late Preclassic (400 bc–ad 250) site of Noh K'uh demonstrates how both the altered and unaltered environment signified the importance of cosmological concepts within this society. In an area rich with mountains and caves, the natural landscape offered residents opportunities to create symbolically meaningful living spaces. Evidence from local settlements reveals how the cosmological universe played a guiding role during the site's peak growth period, suggesting that other common contributors (such as economic and militaristic needs) of expansion may have been secondary.

The causes of the disappearance of Late Chalcolithic society (Ghassulian) in the early fourth millennium bc remain obscure. This study identifies the collapse as the consequence of a change in the approach to metallurgy from cosmological fundament (Late Chalcolithic) to a practical craft (EB1). This endogenous transition accounts for the cultural recession characterizing the transitional period (EB1A) and the discontinuity in ritual practices. The new practical approach in metallurgy is firstly observed in the southern margin of the Ghassulian culture, which produced copper for distribution in the Nile valley rather than the southern Levant. Nevertheless, the Ghassulian cultural markers visible in the newly emerging areas of copper working (southern coastal plain, Nile valley) denote the survival of the old cosmological traditions among metalworkers of the EB1 culture. Their religious expression unveils the extension of the Ghassulian beliefs attached to metallurgy and their metamorphosis into the esoteric fundaments of the Bronze Age religions.

It is now 25 years since Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (henceforth SSA) was first published in 1982. Why run a review feature upon a book this old? Clearly not to let readers know about its now-familiar contents. One justification is historical. Very few works have had such an effect — in archaeology, the nearest parallel comes with works such as Binford and Binford's New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968, which laid the basis for an entire agenda of New Archaeology. Like Binford and Binford's book, SSA marked a transformation of archaeology as much as, or more than, it actually transformed the field itself. It signalled the coming of age of a coherent cohort of young, energetic scholars with a strongly defined new agenda. It breached taken-for-granted limits with bold, even flagrant ambition; it consciously invoked new intellectual frames. As much as any particular publishing event can punctuate the scholarly process with the intimation of a new direction, the publication of SSA did so.

And yet, a review feature on the book would perhaps not be entirely justified as purely a historical retrospective. It is clear from the trajectory of theoretical publication in Britain (and to some extent America) over the last decades, from the content of archaeological theory courses in universities, and the vocabulary bounced around at conferences such as TAG and the SAAs, that the agenda of SSA — often termed ‘post-processualism’ — has become the dominant voice in mainstream archaeological theory. The challenger has become the establishment; the once-unthinkable has become normal science. There are many other theoretical voices, of course, but even self-proclaimed alternative movements show signs of having absorbed, osmotically, much of the theoretical agenda set by post-processualism, even if their answers differ.

Twenty-five is a human generation, and perhaps the closest approach to eternity in the rapidly fermenting world of theory; the current generation of students (future colleagues, really) will have known no other paradigm. Hence, we have asked our contributors not only to comment retrospectively upon the book itself, but also prospectively, on how well its agenda has weathered the years, on what roads remain untaken, and upon where they think the future might lie.