The debate regarding the status of the Blombos ochre engravings and shell beads for gauging the timeline of when cognitive abilities and symbolic intent appeared has been controversial. This is mainly due to the fact that what is referred to as symbolic is often too loosely defined and is therefore attributed to artefacts in an indiscriminate way. Recent evidence from various concurrent sites in southern Africa, including Blombos, provide the opportunity for a more nuanced analysis of the probable level of symbolic intent and how this relates to neuro-cognitive precursors. In what follows, it will be shown that, although some of the southern African artefacts do indeed demonstrate particular kinds of ‘symbolic’ intent, others need to be approached with caution. Data from the visual brain is presented that provides crucial evidence as to the appropriate level of intent suggested by the engravings and shell beads from the southern Africa context.

Within the recent popularity of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in material culture studies, scholars tend to lose sight of its origin in ethnography of laboratory work. In particular, ANT studies how scientific facts are constructed and stabilized in laboratories so that they become universally accepted, seemingly platonic, categories. This article returns to this initial insight and links it to the long-standing issue of archaeological types. Analysis of the practices of production, consumption and distribution of terra sigillata — Roman archaeology's most salient pottery type — shows how it became a category, how it was stabilized as such, and how this process imbued sigillata with specific agentic properties that allowed it to shape the range of possible actions in the past. By reframing platonic types as constructed categories, they can become active elements in our historical narratives.

This article reviews the evidence for planning behaviour in Middle Pleistocene hominids. It documents the way in which raw material procurement and tool production were structured during the Middle Pleistocene occupations of the Spanish sites of Sierra de Atapuerca, Torralba, Ambrona and Aridos. Differences in the use of raw materials for different kinds of tool or end-product allow inferences to be drawn about pre-Neanderthal intentionality and cognitive ability. The overall pattern of technological behaviour demonstrated by this study is far removed from the purely ‘opportunistic’ and can reasonably be described as involving both forethought and planning. The work is presented from a techno-economic perspective based on the differential use of raw material types present in the lithic assemblages of these sites, and the proximity of sources of these raw materials in the surrounding landscape.

During the Late Pleistocene, children in southwest France and northern Spain grew up engaging with the world around them through the lenses of locally and historically situated pictorial cultures. This particular period and region is not the site of the earliest example of symbolic behaviour, nor is it the only example of the production of imagery during the Pleistocene but the rich record of Franco-Cantabrian visual material culture provides a unique opportunity to explore how children learned to decode and transform the world around them through imagery. In this paper, focusing on parietal art, I consider the biological, cognitive and social underpinnings of the uniquely human ability to move between two and three dimensional worlds and to perceive a fourth dimension—time—through the perception of motion from still images. These abilities, which can be traced through the archaeological record, allowed children and the adults they became new ways of imagining and acting in the world.

Neuropsychological and developmental studies suggest human musical ability has a deep evolutionary history; but we do not find evidence of the manufacture and use of instruments, with which musical behaviours have often been assumed to be equated, until 70,000 years after the advent of Homo sapiens. This anomaly is addressed by examining the evidence from the fossil record for the evolution of the physiology and neurology required for musical behaviours, with the aim of identifying the development of the physiological and neurological capacity to produce and process melody and/or rhythm. Aural and vocal sophistication appear to have developed in tandem, beginning with full bipedalism around 1.75 million years ago, until a vocal apparatus similar to the modern was present in Homo heidelbergensis 400,000–300,000 years ago. Prosodic and structural aspects of both speech and music production and processing are lateralized in the brain in similar ways suggesting evolutionarily-shared foundations for these mechanisms.

The Narmer Palette occupies a key position in our understanding of the transition from Predynastic to Dynastic culture in Egypt. Previous interpretations have focused largely upon correspondences between its decorative content and later conventions of élite display. Here, the decoration of the palette is instead related to its form and functional attributes and their derivation from the Neolithic cultures of the Nile Valley, which are contrasted with those of southwest Asia and Europe. It is argued that the widespread adoption of a pastoral lifestyle during the fifth millennium BC was associated with new modes of bodily display and ritual, into which cattle and other animals were incorporated. These constituted an archive of cultural forms and practices which the makers of the Narmer Palette, and other Protodynastic monuments, drew from and transformed. Taking cattle as a focus, the article begins with a consideration of interpretative problems relating to animal art and ritual in archaeology, and stresses the value of perspectives derived from the anthropology of pastoral societies.

The changing cosmological symbolism incorporated in Phases 1 and 2 at Stonehenge is reviewed in the light of new evidence from patterns of deposition prior to the construction of the bluestone and sarsen stone settings. The early structure of the monument and attendant depositional practices embodied a scheme of radial division, including a symbolic quartering primarily demarcated by solstitial rising and setting points. Through sustained ritual practice, however, the motions of the moon came increasingly to be referenced through deposition, particularly of cremations. This evidence seems to contradict earlier claims of a sudden shift in and around Wessex during the mid-third millennium BC from a predominantly lunar to a predominantly solar cosmology. It suggests instead that interest in solar and lunar events did not necessarily preclude each other and that over the centuries there was a process of subtle change involving the continual reworking of symbolic schemes emphasizing a sense of ‘timelessness’ and the unchanging order of the universe.

The shamanistic interpretation of hunter-gatherer rock arts has in recent years been heavily criticized. Much of this criticism draws on some of the same fundamental flaws in the shamanistic approach to understanding rock arts. In this article I briefly outline what it is about shamanism and its use in rock-art research that both sides of the debate have got wrong. Taking southern African hunter-gatherer rock art as a starting point, I demonstrate a new way of understanding rock art is indeed possible. I then explore the possibilities of this approach by examining rock art from the post Palaeolithic in Spain, and the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe.

A monolithic view of Classic Maya society as dominated by divine rulers who inexplicably ceased to erect monuments with long-count dates during the ninth century is examined by reference to new information from Terminal Classic sites in the Sibun Valley of Belize. In this locale and elsewhere, the construction of circular one-room buildings — with striking associated artefacts — may be interpreted as signalling social tensions between the orthodoxy of Classic Maya divine rulers and the more heterodoxic beliefs and practices associated with circular structures built at the end of the Classic period. The round buildings are contextualized within the diversity of architectural expressions of the Sibun Valley and also within a peninsula-wide network of shrines. The chronological placement and character of the Sibun shrines is discussed by way of radiocarbon assays, obsidian sourced by INAA, and raw materials used for groundstone at sites throughout the valley. The presence of marine shell and speleothems — likely used as architectural adornment — found in close association with Sibun Valley round buildings permits discussion of the manner in which elements of the local effected a translation of heterodoxic tenets into vernacularized shrine architecture.

A distinctive aspect of human behaviour is the ability to think symbolically. However, tracking the origin of this capability is controversial. From a Peircean perspective, to know if something truly is a symbol we need to know the cultural context in which it was created. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it is more salient to ask how they functioned as signs. Specifically we argue that using the Peircean distinction between qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns provides support for this endeavour. The ‘flickering’ of early symbolic behaviour (the sporadic occurrences of objects with embedded social meanings in the Pleistocene archaeological record) can best be seen as sinsigns, whereas sites that show long-term presence of such materials are demonstrating the presence of legisigns: the codification of ideas. To illustrate this approach, we apply these ideas to three classes of artefacts, demonstrating how this system can address issues of relevance to palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists who often fetishize the symbolic as the one ability that makes us human.

Collective tombs are a characteristic feature of Neolithic societies of Western Europe. Some recent studies have suggested that they originated from an earlier tradition of individual burials at the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. The concept of collective burial involving movement and manipulation of bodies and body parts is, however, entirely different. The former tries to preserve the integrity of the bodies and does not acknowledge the stages of metamorphosis of the corpse. The latter by contrast involves observation and assistance in the dissolution of the body. Recent discoveries of Early Mesolithic collective tombs in southern Belgium have underlined the fact that collective burials are far from restricted to Neolithic contexts in Western Europe. They themselves, however, are not merely a potential point of origin for Middle and Late Neolithic collective tombs but form part of a long-standing tradition reaching back into the Upper Palaeolithic.

Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their disciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo-European). In this article, a comparative-historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better-known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser-known case-study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.

Recent breakthroughs in the cognitive and brain sciences, most importantly developments in neuroimaging technologies including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), event-related potential (ERP), and magnetoencephalography (MEG), have opened a new window on the human mind and offered a whole new set of possibilities for exploring its hidden functional architecture. This growing analytic potential can also be seen reflected in the numerous new fields of research, ranging from neuroethics and neuroprosthetics to the latest emerging field of neuroeconomics, which each year are being added to the rapidly expanding domain of contemporary cognitive and brain sciences. Despite these important developments however, within archaeology there has been little awareness of the challenging questions constantly arising from current findings in this field. With a few recent exceptions in the areas of cognitive archaeology and evolutionary neuroscience (e.g. Stout et al. 2000; Stout & Chaminade 2007; Dehaene et al. 2005; Frey 2003; 2004; 2008; Bruner 2003; 2004; Gibson 1993; Wynn & Coolidge 2003; 2004; Coolidge & Wynn 2004; 2005; Deacon 1997; Hodgson & Helvenston 2006; Mithen 2005), no systematic attempt has been made to channel this huge emerging potential in the direction of a common integrated research program targeting the big picture of human cognitive evolution (both before and most importantly after the socalled speciation phase) (but see Renfrew et al. 2008). Although archaeologists do not excavate neural tissue, we should bear in mind that the development of functional neuroimaging has allowed the investigation of a whole new set of questions which raise a host of archaeological and anthropological issues and thus demand our attention and critical evaluation.

The Classic Maya (ad 250–950) landscape was imbued with sacred, animate qualities. Of particular significance were openings in the earth, such as caves and pools because, as portals to the underworld, the Maya could communicate with gods and ancestors to petition for plentiful rain and crops. The 25 pools of Cara Blanca, Belize embody such a place; their isolation from settled communities and the relatively sparse but unique architecture near pools suggest that it served as a pilgrimage destination. Growing evidence from exploratory dives and excavations at a possible water temple indicate that the Maya increased their visits in response to several prolonged droughts that struck between c.ad 800 and 900. Not only do we present results from a type of site that has been little explored, we also detail how non-elites dealt with climate change via ritual intensification and pilgrimage. It also serves as a lesson for how we deal with climate change today — that relying on traditional means rather than changing our course of action can have detrimental repercussions.

In at least 400 European caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira, Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens groups drew, painted and engraved non-figurative signs from at least ~42,000 bp and figurative images (notably animals) from at least 37,000 bp. Since their discovery ~150 years ago, the purpose or meaning of European Upper Palaeolithic non-figurative signs has eluded researchers. Despite this, specialists assume that they were notational in some way. Using a database of images spanning the European Upper Palaeolithic, we suggest how three of the most frequently occurring signs—the line <|>, the dot <•>, and the <Y>—functioned as units of communication. We demonstrate that when found in close association with images of animals the line <|> and dot <•> constitute numbers denoting months, and form constituent parts of a local phenological/meteorological calendar beginning in spring and recording time from this point in lunar months. We also demonstrate that the <Y> sign, one of the most frequently occurring signs in Palaeolithic non-figurative art, has the meaning <To Give Birth>. The position of the <Y> within a sequence of marks denotes month of parturition, an ordinal representation of number in contrast to the cardinal representation used in tallies. Our data indicate that the purpose of this system of associating animals with calendar information was to record and convey seasonal behavioural information about specific prey taxa in the geographical regions of concern. We suggest a specific way in which the pairing of numbers with animal subjects constituted a complete unit of meaning—a notational system combined with its subject—that provides us with a specific insight into what one set of notational marks means. It gives us our first specific reading of European Upper Palaeolithic communication, the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.

An examination of meanings associated with bears among early hunter-gatherer-fisher populations in northern Fennoscandia, based on beliefs and ritual practices in the ethnohistoric record, indicates that they were an animal attributed multiple meanings in prehistoric as well as historic times. They were clan ancestors, spirit masters and symbols of power and reincarnation such as rebirth and the change of seasons. The evidence indicates a pattern of local variation and identities rather than a uniform regional pattern, and some large-scale differences from the coastal area of Norway in the west to Karelia in the east.

Archaeological approaches to death and commemoration which privilege the negotiation of power relationships can underestimate the importance of personal and emotional responses to bereavement and mortality. Remembrance of the dead of the First World War is often understood in terms of the promotion of nationalist ideologies, but emotional factors such as grief and shock were also involved in the shaping of commemorative responses. In this article, responses to the First World War at national, local, and individual levels are considered. I suggest that people select monuments, places and ways of remembering for their power to express intense and personal feelings.

In southern Africa, there has been a long-standing but unsubstantiated assumption that the site of Khami evolved out of Great Zimbabwe's demise around ad 1450. The study of local ceramics from the two sites indicate that the respective ceramic traditions are clearly different across the entire sequence, pointing towards different cultural affiliations in their origins. Furthermore, there are tangible typological differences between and within their related dry-stone architecture. Finally, absolute and relative chronologies of the two sites suggest that Khami flourished as a major centre from the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century, long before Great Zimbabwe's decline. Great Zimbabwe also continued to be occupied into the late seventeenth and perhaps eighteenth centuries, after the decline of Khami. Consequently, the combined significance of these observations contradicts the parent-offspring relationship implied in traditional frameworks. Instead, as chronologically overlapping entities, the relationship between Khami and Great Zimbabwe, was heterarchical. However, within the individual polities, malleable hierarchies of control and situational heterarchies were a common feature. This is in tune with historically documented political relations in related pre-colonial southern Zambezian states, and motivates for contextual approaches to imagining power relations in pre-colonial African contexts.