Excavations at the Early Dynastic site of Abu Salabikh in southern Iraq have aimed at recovering a rounded view of early urban life. One of the questions regularly and rightly asked about our results is ‘how large was the population?’, but we are still far from being able to provide an answer. This article is intended as a report from the field on where we stand at this one site, rather than a general exploration of the issues. Geomorphological and taphonomic issues relating to site size and use of space are exemplified from our own data. Progress beyond a blanket guess (based on comparative ethnography) for population density requires us to break the urban area down into individual houses and the houses into individual rooms. In this context the need for, and possible methods of, more accurate characterization of space use are described. Calculations based on high and low assumptions illustrate the wide range of estimates we still have to work with, but help to crystallize those areas where progress might be made.

How should archaeologists approach ethnicity? This concept, which has such wide currency in social and anthropological studies, remains elusive when we seek to apply it to the archaeological past. The importance of ethnicity in our late twentieth-century world can easily lead us to believe that it must long have been a key element in human relations and awareness. The practice of defining oneself and one's group by contrast and opposition to other individuals and other groups, from the family level upwards, appears a basic feature of human behaviour. Ethnicity is a part of this social logic, though ethnic groups, and ethnicity itself, are notoriously difficult to define.

Can we identify and distinguish ethnic groupings in the archaeological record? Had one posed that question earlier this century the answer would have no doubt have made immediate reference to the ‘culture-people hypothesis’; the idea that archaeological assemblages may be combined into ‘cultures’ defined by recurring features, be they metalwork, ceramic forms and decoration, or lithic technology. Each culture so defined might be equated (hypothetically at least) with a former people. Ethnographic studies, however, have long shown that these equations are overly simplistic. Phenomena such as the ‘Beaker culture’ are no longer assumed to be the material expression of a single ethnic group.

Where historical evidence is available, it may be able to overcome some of the difficulties and examine just how a historical ethnic group — as perceived and defined by its own members — relates to a body of archaeological material. Jonathan Hall's study of ethnic identity in ancient Greece provides an excellent example of just such an approach. It also raises broader issues concerning the definition of ethnicity and its recognition in the archaeological record. Hall himself takes the view that ethnicity depends on what people say, not what they do; hence material culture alone, without supporting literary evidence, is an insufficient basis for the investigation of ethnic identity in past societies. To accept that view is to rule out the study of ethnicity for the greater part of the human past; we may suspect that ethnic groups played a part, but be unable to identify any surviving cultural parameters. Against such a pessimistic assessment, however, there is the contrary argument, that ethnicity may be expressed as well in material culture as in words. Should that be the case, archaeology may indeed be well equipped to open a window on past ethnicity, whether or not there are relevant contemporary texts.

We begin this review feature in our usual way, with a summary by Jonathan Hall of the arguments set out in his book. Five commentators then take up the theme, raising comments and criticisms to which Hall responds in a closing reply.

The aim of this article is to situate archaeological approaches to modern conflicts within a framework of conflict memory and commemoration. A critical appreciation of historical archaeology as a commemorative practice requires a firm grounding in memory theory, specifically the formation and contestation of memory narratives. This article offers a detailed analysis of the relevant theories and demonstrates their applicability in the contested archaeology of the Nazi era in Berlin. On the basis of this critique I argue that archaeological work on contested sites offers a unique and powerful forum for socially engaged interdisciplinary research.

The study of butterfly beads, which first appeared during the tenth millennium cal. bc, covers an important span of the Neolithization process and gives new insights on the symbolic and socio-economic systems of the first farming communities in the Near East. By the end of the Pre-pottery Neolithic, butterfly beads acquired sophisticated shapes and became appreciably larger. Simultaneously, the choice of raw materials changed towards brighter and more colourful allochthonous rocks. These changes reflect a desire to make the butterfly beads more conspicuous as well as an increased demand for ‘prestige’ materials. The technological mastery required to shape and perforate these beads suggests craft specialization and changes in social organization. The morphological and technological complexity of these items, the aesthetic quality of their raw materials, the variability in the degrees of use-wear, along with the particularity of the archaeological contexts, imply a polysemantic reading of their symbolic functions. Butterfly beads were likely related to motherhood and fecundity. Objects of memory and valuable items of ‘prestige’, they comprised part of family or group heirlooms and were worn for special ceremonies. They undoubtedly represented the cultural identity of the first farming societies in upper Mesopotamia and the Levant.

Studying the emergence of teaching in our lineage entails identifying learning strategies among human and non-human groups, understanding the situations in which they occur, evaluating their performance, recognizing their expression in the archaeological record, identifying trends in the way knowledge transmission changed through time, and detecting the key moments in which members of our lineage complemented pre-existing transmission strategies with those that led our species to develop cumulative culture and eventually ‘teaching’ as we know it. Here we explore how learning processes function in spatial, temporal, and social dimensions and use the resulting situations to build a tentative framework, which may guide our interpretation of the archaeological record and ultimately aid our identification of the learning processes at work in animal and past hominin societies. We test the pertinence of this heuristic approach by applying it to a handful of archaeological case studies.

The ashmounds of the central Deccan Plateau remain one of the most enigmatic features of the South Indian Neolithic. While Allchin proposed a primarily ritualistic interpretation for the large mounds of burnt cattle dung, more recent discussion has often stressed more prosaic understandings, underlining the adaptive or economic significance of the ashmounds as indicators of pastoralism or stressing the possibility that they represent accidental or sanitation-related fires. This article argues for a return to more symbolic perspectives on the ashmounds, and offers further support for a ritualistic reading based on evidence relating to the landscape context of ashmounds and other Neolithic remains in the central Deccan region. The article explores the landscape associations of ashmounds in the Bellary District of Karnataka, and in particular draws on new discoveries at the sites of Kudatini and Toranagallu in order to reconstruct aspects of a Southern Neolithic ‘world view’ or cosmology. The article also explores the implications of the ashmounds to subsequent developments in the Indian subcontinent, particularly those relating to the symbolic importance of cattle, dung and ash in Hindu practices, and argues for long-term continuities in certain prehistoric material symbols (though not their associated meanings). In addition, the article takes a wider comparative approach, and explores the implications of South Indian Neolithic practices for our understanding of the Neolithic ‘process’ in general, and in particular the emphasis on transformative processes that appears to distinguish Neolithic approaches to the material world from those that preceded them.

The present article develops a framework for interpreting Upper Palaeolithic artefacts from an analysis of material complexity, numeration systems and timekeeping using cultural categorizations, insights on the emergence of number terms in language, and the astronomy practices of 33 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. Our key findings suggest that astronomy originates in the ability to estimate and infer contextual relations among natural phenomena and transitions from these natural associations to material representations and cognitive technologies that mediate conceptual apprehensions of time as a substance that can be quantified. Given that artefacts may act as scaffolds for explicit concepts of numbers, and numbers scaffold explicit concepts of time, prehistoric artefacts such as the Blombos Cave beads (c. 75,000 bp), Abri Blanchard and Cellier artefacts (c. 28,000 bp), and plaque from Grotte du Taï (c. 14,000 bp) may represent similar scaffolding and conceptual development in numbers and time. It is proposed that the prehistoric societies making these artefacts possessed, in addition to material complexity, the abilities to express quantities in language and to use material externalization and cognitive technologies. Furthermore, the Abri Blanchard artefact is proposed to represent externalized working memory, a very modern interaction between mind and material culture.

In this paper, we review the current Philippine archaeological record between c. 14,000 and 4000 cal. bp in the context of our developing understanding of human adaptation to post-glacial environments at the end of the Pleistocene, and the cultural and technological changes that were occurring across Southeast Asia during this period. Due to their location at the northwestern fringes of Wallacea, close proximity to Borneo and Taiwan, and the long Palawan coastline bordering the southern margins of the South China Sea, the Philippines have likely acted as a conduit for the movements of people, material culture and ideas between the islands of Southeast Asia throughout prehistory. Current research suggests that the Philippines were possibly embedded in larger maritime networks from the Late Pleistocene onwards. This appears to have been a period of significant social change and technological innovation, as illustrated by the appearance of new organic and inorganic technologies and the emergence of diverse burial traditions across Southeast Asia. These included sophisticated fishing strategies, techniques of hafting and composite tool production, and long-distance interaction across the Philippine archipelago and Island Southeast Asia perhaps as far as Near Oceania.

Since the 1980s, archaeologists have challenged the idea that prehistoric actions were guided primarily by practicality and expedience. Rubbish disposal, a superficially mundane activity, provides a critical case for exploring the depth to which cultural logics penetrate. Ethnoarchaeological research on discard behaviour in Mesoamerican houselots has modelled rubbish disposal as a matter of expedience predictable by factors such as density of settlement and length of occupation. At the Classic period site of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, such models based on practical reason succeed only partly in predicting the distribution of rubbish. Ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of rubbish in Mesoamerica suggest that fully understanding its distribution requires attention to cultural logics. At Chunchucmil, ancient Maya cosmology explains the location of dumps within households. Thus, both practical and cultural logics structured discard. The case of Maya subsistence farming suggests that practical logic is subsumed by cultural logic, rather than the two logics conflicting. These findings show how broadly-held beliefs and predispositions are instantiated and reproduced in daily life.

Where does biology end and culture begin? While the human body is now widely accepted as being both biological and cultural, the brain is still considered by archaeologists as being a biological entity that provides the capacity for culture and is subject to no further change after the evolution of Homo sapiens. This article reviews recent research that suggests that the brain has continued to evolve at an increasing rate in recent times under the influence of culturally created environments and that both the anatomy and function of individual brains can be manipulated by cultural behaviour. It describes an experiment in which one of us successfully changed his own brain in response to his cultural activity.

Is archaeology a science? Is archaeology a humanity? What are the politics of spectatorship and archaeological representation? These initial thoughts form the basis for our archaeological explorations. Within current archaeological discourse, there are a growing number of requests for expressions, which illuminate and expose the interpretive and artistic qualities of presentation and narration. Yet few scholars actively utilize expressive practice to explore these philosophical issues. As such, we feel that it is an opportune time to intervene in visual and textual discourse by issuing a manifesto for our project. We call for a development of a critically reflexive practice of visual archaeological expressionism, which seeks to contest traditional modes of thought and action.

In preparing for the publication of the seven papers in the special supplement of Cambridge Archaeological Journal, we were concerned to find an outlet that could find a worldwide audience, as we believe that these papers have more than regional or period significance. That is a big claim. The case studies presented in the supplement are all of early Neolithic long barrows and long cairns of the fourth millennium cal. bc in southern England. Why should a study of the dating of constructions that held the remains of selected human dead, from a particular region of northwest Europe, at a particular point in the regional Neolithic sequence, have any wider importance? We offer two reasons. First, we are applying, perhaps for the first time to a group of monuments rather than to individual sites, a method for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates which enables much more precise estimates of chronology. Secondly, from this promise of far more robust and precise dating come many implications for the kinds of agents that we may wish to people our pasts, for the kinds of lives they lived, and for the histories that we can try to write about them. These are two developments, we suggest, which any archaeology needs to embrace.

Why are humans musical? Why do people in all cultures sing or play instruments? Why do we appear to have specialized neurological apparatus for hearing and interpreting music as distinct from other sounds? And how does our musicality relate to language and to our evolutionary history?

Anthropologists and archaeologists have paid little attention to the origin of music and musicality — far less than for either language or ‘art’. While art has been seen as an index of cognitive complexity and language as an essential tool of communication, music has suffered from our perception that it is an epiphenomenal ‘leisure activity’, and archaeologically inaccessible to boot. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Steven Mithen; music is integral to human social life, he argues, and we can investigate its ancestry with the same rich range of analyses — neurological, physiological, ethnographic, linguistic, ethological and even archaeological — which have been deployed to study language.

In The Singing Neanderthals Steven Mithen poses these questions and proposes a bold hypothesis to answer them. Mithen argues that musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it.

This is an argument with implications which extend far beyond the mere origins of music itself into the very motives of human origins. Any argument of such range is bound to attract discussion and critique; we here present commentaries by archaeologists Clive Gamble and Iain Morley and linguists Alison Wray and Maggie Tallerman, along with Mithen's response to them. Whether right or wrong, Mithen has raised fascinating and important issues. And it adds a great deal of charm to the time-honoured, perhaps shopworn image of the Neanderthals shambling ineffectively through the pages of Pleistocene prehistory to imagine them humming, crooning or belting out a cappella harmonies as they went.

Building on recent criticisms of Romanization, this contribution formulates a systematic critique of the concept of Egyptianization and suggests a different theoretical approach to cultural process in New Kingdom Nubia that benefits from the insights of ‘cultural entanglement’. This approach emphasizes multidirectional and interactive perspectives that allow for a variety of acculturative outcomes rather than one-sided assimilation. A useful epistemological framework for its application in archaeology is illustrated through two case studies, focusing respectively on representations of Egyptianized Nubians in Egyptian art and Lower Nubian burial customs. The outcomes of the case studies argue for a provocative re-reading of cultural process in New Kingdom Lower Nubia, and may help to clarify the general picture of Nubian history by explaining why and how Nubian traits re-appeared in the Napatan-Meroitic Kingdom of Kush. Finally, the article considers some broader methodological and theoretical issues relating to cultural mixture in the archaeological record.

Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire: Transe et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées, by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams, 1996. Paris: Éditions Seuil; ISBN 2-02-028902-4 hardback 249FF, 110 pp., 114 colour ills.

The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams, 1996. New York (NY): Harry N. Abrams; ISBN 0-8109-4182-1 hardback, US$49.50, 120 pp., 116 colour ills.

Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams' recent book Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire builds on a body of rock art research which has come to dominate the field, marginalizing interest in other cultural themes such as totemism and records of everyday foraging. Shamanism and totemism are, however, two of the most pervasive indigenous theories of being to have been discussed in the anthropological literature. The word totem comes from the Ojibwa, a native North American people, while the word shaman comes from the Tungus of central Siberia. Their use cross-culturally to refer to types of religion (i.e. shamanism and totemism), is an artefact of anthropology. Shamanism can be applied to customs that are inferred to have arisen independently in different parts of the world; customs in a single circum-arctic culture area; or scattered survivals from an allegedly original human condition. The cross-cultural validity of shamanism has been considered by Eliade, Lewis, Hultkrantz and Vitebsky. Shamanism refers to the use of spirits as guardians and helpers of individuals, contacted through trance. The validity of totemism as a cross-culturally-valid category has been vigorously debated in anthropology. It is generally agreed to refer to the use of animals or plants as emblems or guardians of social groups celebrated in ritual. The rationale of totemism is that each group is identified with a different species; the significance of each species derives from its place in the cognitive structure. Group A is kangaroo because it is not emu or python. While Durkheim interpreted totemism as the original human religion, Lévi-Strauss persuasively argued that totemism is a product of human cognition, which has developed independently in North America, Australia and Africa.

In 2002, an investigation into the rock art of Waanyi country was undertaken in conjunction with ongoing archaeological excavation. Various subjects, styles and techniques were documented, associated oral history from Waanyi elders was recorded and the relationship to archaeological deposits was assessed. A large number of rainbow-like designs, in red or red-and-yellow, were recorded, along with a magnificent and very large red-and-yellow Rainbow Serpent. These and other images are discussed in relation to the travels of Ancestral Beings, stories and uses of coloured pigment and the use of local stone for both tools and the situating of important spiritual sites. Links to a network of other communities across northern and central Australia are highlighted. It is concluded that colour played a fundamental role in both expressing and maintaining relationships to places, Ancestral Beings and other groups of people. Important local differences can be seen in comparison to the ways in which colour has been used by Aboriginal people elsewhere. The research highlights ways in which the study of colour can prove valuable to archaeology globally.

Franco-Cantabrian cave art continues to be the focus of much speculation but despite the many theories put forward there has been little progress in explaining the range of perplexing features of this ‘art’. Only by regarding such wide-ranging and anomalous characteristics as central to this debate might some progress as to derivation be possible. The account presented in this article will demonstrate how the many ‘contradictions’ prevailing might provide an important indication as to provenance that can be explained through an understanding of the shifting nature of visual imagery in the context of the everyday lives of Upper Palaeolithic communities. This will be based on the notion that the visual world as perceived can be disrupted by certain types of psychological effects that can be subsequently triggered by particular kinds of stimulus cues and evocative situations.

Archaeologists have usually glossed over parietal finger flutings, especially non-figurative and non-symbolic lines. This article develops a nomenclature and defines four forms to provide a descriptive structure from which to build analyses. It then develops methods for such investigations, using experiments and studies of physiology to derive information about the fluters from the flutings. The methods are applied to each of the four forms of fluting, showing which approaches may be most useful for each form. Broader questions and applications are touched on, including approaches to meaning, figures, and other families of parietal markings such as hand stencils. This approach to flutings augments other approaches to prehistoric ‘art’ by seeking to know about the artists themselves, their gender, age, size, handedness, and the number of individuals involved in creating a panel.

There can be no doubt that Peter Bellwood's First Farmers is a major new statement which presents a robustly expressed solution to one of those classic problems which provides a benchmark for theorization and justifies archaeology as a field. But agreement stops there. Few academic books published recently have evoked such highly charged reactions. On the one hand, First Farmers has impressed many critics, reached audiences far afield from traditional archaeological readerships, and garnered major book awards from professional bodies such as the Society for American Archaeology. On the other hand, it has been subjected to a level of concerted criticism rare in the academic world. As the reviews below show, it has clearly hit a nerve; the gloves are off.

First Farmers polarizes scholars in complex ways. Much recent work on agricultural origins, particularly in Europe, has had a strongly indigenist and particularistic tone, averse to mass movements of peoples and ‘grand narratives’ in general. But even advocates of grand narrative in general may take exception to Bellwood's ‘language dispersals’ thesis. Similarly, the very attempt to bring together linguistic, genetic and archaeological data in an account of the past is controversial to some, but even those who aspire to this kind of interdisciplinary synthesis rarely agree on how it can be carried out.

Neither the book nor its critics here are likely to be the last word on the subject. But whether one agrees with it or not, First Farmers is a welcome addition to the agricultural origins scene, which, at least in Europe, has been evolving over the last two decades towards a sort of eclectic middle-ground consensus in which difference of opinion is accommodated by eschewing bold generalization.

In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of agency within Posthumanism and suggest that we may be better off thinking about affect. Third, we explore how the approach we advocate treats difference in new ways, not as a question of lack, or as difference ‘from’, but rather as a productive force in the world. Finally, we explore how Posthumanism allows us to re-position the role of the human in archaeology,