This paper introduces a new art style, Singa Transitional, found painted onto a mountainside near the modern town of Singa in the north of Huánuco, Peru. This style was discovered during a recent regional survey of rock art in the Huánuco region that resulted in the documentation of paintings at more than 20 sites, the identification of their chronological contexts and an analysis of the resulting data for trends in changing social practices over nine millennia. I explore how the style emerged from both regional artistic trends in the medium and broader patterns evident in Andean material culture from multiple media at the time of its creation. I argue that the presence of Singa Transitional demonstrates that local peoples were engaged in broader social trends unfolding during the transition between the Early Horizon (800–200 bc) and the Early Intermediate Period (ad 0–800) in Peru. I propose that rock art placed in prominent places was considered saywa, a type of landscape feature that marked boundaries in and movement through landscapes. Singa Transitional saywas served to advertise the connection between local Andean people and their land and was a medium through which social changes were contested in the Andes.

In this article we put forward an alternative account of the famous wristguards, or bracers, of the European Early Bronze Age. Combining new materialism with empirical microwear analysis, we study 15 examples from Britain in detail and suggest a different way of conceptualizing these objects. Rather than demanding they have a singular function, we treat these objects as ‘multiplicities’ and as always in process. This, in turn, has significant implications for the important archaeological concepts of typology and object biography and our understandings of material culture more widely.

This paper presents key results of the Making a Mark project (2014–2016), which aimed to provide a contextual framework for the analysis of mark making on portable artefacts in the British and Irish Neolithic by comparing them with other mark-making practices, including rock art and passage tomb art. The project used digital imaging techniques, including Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and improved radiocarbon chronologies, to develop a new understanding of the character of mark making in the British and Irish Neolithic. Rather than considering this tradition in representational terms, as expression of human ideas, we focus on two kinds of relational material practices, the processes of marking and the production of skeuomorphs, and their emergent properties. We draw on Karen Barad's concept of ‘intra-action’ and Gilles Deleuze's notion of differentiation to understand the evolution and development of mark-making traditions and how they relate to other kinds of social practices over the course of the Neolithic.

American Indian rock art is distributed across a portion of the east-flowing Arkansas River Valley in a distinctive spatial pattern in which motifs and compositions referencing spirit world subject matter predominate along the north side of the river, in contrast to imagery depicting the observable world on the south. This pattern accords with cosmological components of the belief systems of Dhegiha Siouan-speaking tribes, as expressed in the spatial elements of other cultural phenomena, including village layouts and ritual choreographies, among such groups as the Osage and Quapaw, who occupied the region during later historic times. One sandstone prominence also located south of the river attracted the attention of Precolumbian artists, who decorated its exposed surfaces with an intriguing depiction of a mask, partly obscured by lichen, exhibiting the telltale eyes and other characteristics of the Mesoamerican rain god Tlaloc. Examination of this image, along with a second possible Mesoamerican- or Southwestern-inspired image located north of the river, serves to enlarge our understanding of the wider distributional pattern, especially on the topic of how local communities incorporated exotic ideas into the fabric of their cosmological landscapes.

Early urban societies feature specialized processes that integrate disparate populations as part of their social construction. One such process is commensalism and the associated display of exotica from interregional interaction. Hosts of a feast between 400 and 300 bce at the early urban centre of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, displayed pottery that manifested relationships with urban elites at Monte Albán and other regions of Oaxaca, but also expressed connections with something fundamentally different. The hosts sacrificed a greenstone sculpture in the Mezcala style from Guerrero state, located to the west and previously unknown in Oaxaca aesthetics. The discovery of this figure contributes to reassessing the extent of interaction during a time often marked by regionalism in Oaxaca as well as providing information on the little-known Mezcala civilization. A relational ontology explores how the discovery of this agentive object and the alterity of its aesthetics facilitates understanding perceptions of distant others or imaginaries, and how such entanglements facilitated processes of status differentiation for nascent urban elites, particularly their role as mediators.

Iron Age saunas, unique to the Castro Culture of northwestern Iberia, have puzzled archaeologists since the nineteenth century. Initially interpreted as kilns, crematoriums, or ovens, their function has since been established as bathing structures; however, the social significance of these saunas has yet to be firmly established. This study provides a new approach to understanding the ways in which Castro communities utilized specialized buildings to serve specific needs related to ritual cleansing and protection. Through an analysis of their placement, structure and decoration, I argue that these buildings functioned to purify and protect people of Castro communities from spiritual and physical danger. Members of Castro society inhabited a world buffeted by the shifting political and economic powers of the Iron Age. The bath structures under study, covered in apotropaic symbols, functioned in liminal spaces to cleanse and prepare Castro people for the dangers that awaited them beyond the walls of their communities and neutralized any potential spiritual contamination they may have acquired upon their return.

The Ceramic Periods in central Chile are a scenario of major changes in mobility and subsistence systems, associated with the incorporation of cultigens as the basis of subsistence. In this paper, we present a study of the funerary contexts of the Ceramic Periods in central Chile in order to assess whether in this scenario, generally considered very significant in the low-scale societies studied here, gender categories were constructed or signified, and how this changed over time. The results of the analysis suggest that gender categorization was not always important in this scenario. Among Llolleo groups, the offerings associated with females and children suggest their relation with production spheres; in Bato groups, on the other hand, age categories seem to be more important. In the Late Intermediate Period, it is the collective aspect that appears to be stressed in the funerary contexts.

Dedicatory offerings of small colourful objects are often found in pre-Hispanic architectural contexts in the Ancestral Pueblo region of the American Southwest. These deposits are particularly numerous in the roof support pillars of circular ritual structures (kivas) at the site of Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, which served as the ceremonial hub of the Chacoan regional system between the tenth and twelfth centuries ce. Based on the importance of directionality and colour in traditional Pueblo worldviews, archaeologists speculate that the contents of these radial offerings may likewise reference significant Chacoan cosmographic elements. In this paper, I explore this idea by examining the distribution of colours and materials in kiva pilaster repositories in relation to directional quadrants, prominent landscape features, and raw material sources. I discuss the results in the context of Pueblo cosmology and assemblage theory, arguing that particular colours were polyvalent and relational, deriving their meanings from their positions within interacting and heterogenous assemblages.

The mathematical number of the golden ratio has long fascinated mathematicians, archaeologists, biologists, architects, engineers, historians, musicians and scholars. Until now, though, there have been only assertions about whether the ancient Greeks employed this ratio in their architecture. To determine whether evidence may have been overlooked, I examined the measurements of 15 temples, 18 monumental tombs, 8 sarcophagi and 58 grave stelae from the fifth century BC to the second century AD. The result is clear: the golden ratio was totally absent from Greek architecture of the classical fifth century BC, and only very rarely employed in the third and the second centuries BC. Consequently, four rare and therefore valuable examples of golden-ratio proportions were identified through this research in a tower, an altar, a tomb and a grave stele. This is the first time that clear evidence has been presented for golden-ratio application in constructions of ancient Greece.

Archaeologists evince a strong tendency to impute significance to the material traces they study, a propensity that has been especially marked since the post-processual emphasis on meaning and that has taken on renewed vigour with the turn to materiality. But are there not situations in which things are rather incidental or insignificant? This set of essays emerged from a workshop held in Berlin in April 2018, in which a group of scholars was invited to discuss the place of the incidental in social life in general and in archaeology in particular. Rather than lengthy formal papers, we offer an introduction that presents a general set of reflections on the issue of the incidentalness of things, followed by essays that pursue particular directions raised by that introduction as well as our discussions in Berlin. It is our hope that these brief forays into a complex topic will stimulate further work on this subject.

Tell sites are central to archaeological interpretation in many world regions due to their lengthy sequences of stratified deposits. However, the cultural choices that create architectural remnants and associated materials are more poorly understood, as are the ways that previous layers situate the living community above. This article calls for agentive understandings of tell-formation processes through examination of archaeological sites in Burkina Faso, West Africa. We argue that tells here formed through strong cultural beliefs of co-residence between the living and ancestral communities. Drawing on data from excavation and cross-section profiles exposed by road construction, we provide evidence that architectural remnants were actively created and preserved in rituals related to the making and veneration of ancestors. Particular places in tells were used for new construction (often with foundation ritual deposits) only after the active memory of the individual faded from the living community, resulting in a slow (at least 80–100 years) stratification process. Through variations on these core ritual processes, dynamic multi-temporal social groups reinvented themselves over 1500 years through eras of inequity, egalitarian revolution and the Black Death pandemic.

This paper proposes a novel procedural framework for the archaeological study of the long-term transformation of religious practices by heuristically defining the religious in terms of their functional-effective elements. Thus, religious activities constitute a distinct communicative domain that responds to and processes the uncertainties and risks of the world. Drawing on this re-definition, this paper proposes a procedure comprising the following units of investigation: (A) what uncertainties and risks of the world were generated in and differentiated by a certain social formation; (B) how were they responded to and processed; and (C) how is the mode of the responding and processing changed as social formations are transformed? The applicability of this procedure is examined through a case study from the pre- and proto-historic periods of the Japanese archipelago. It is hoped that the framework reintroduces causally explanatory, comparative and long-term perspectives to the archaeological study of religious practices.

Space and gender have been two of the ‘buzz words’ in archaeology over the last few years; and quite rightly so, since they identify two of the most crucial aspects of human experience. As we move around buildings today, we are all well aware of norms and restrictions — public spaces and doors marked ‘private’, lounges and bedrooms, stairways and corridors. We negotiate and respect these according to customs and habits learned mainly in childhood. What is true of our own society is true of every other society, past and present, and one of the challenges — not to say obligations — facing archaeologists is to gain some understanding of these spatial mores, even when presented with little more than a ground plan.

In Gilchrist's case-study of medieval English nunneries, the evidence is rather more substantial. Not only has some of the fabric survived — both of churches and their associated buildings — but there is a rich body of textual information about the nunneries, the nuns who inhabited them, and the Christian symbolism and belief which underlay the whole institution.

What better place to study gender and its material expression than in such a uniquely female institution as the medieval nunnery? Fezv would deny that archaeology can play a powerful role in helping us to understand these religious communities — enabling us to see beyond the confines of written records. The application of particular theoretical approaches, however, is somewhat more contentious. Just how well do they fit such a body of evidence? And on a subject where we already have a great deal of textual evidence, can study of the material remains — in layout of buildings, evidence of their use, and iconography — truly reveal new levels of meaning? In sum, how successful is this new analysis?

These are among the key issues which are discussed in the following pages. As usual, we begin this Review Feature with an introduction by the author herself, Roberta Gilchrist. Then follow four contrasting reactions, from archaeologists and historians, rounded off by Gilchrist's reply. Whatever our assessment, the interplay of gender and space has profound and far-reaching significance, and raises issues that no serious historical archaeologist — or indeed prehistorian — can afford to ignore.