The origins and evolution of modern humans has been the dominant interest in palaeoanthropology for the last decade, and much archaeological interpretation has been structured around the various issues associated with whether humans have a recent African origin or a more ancient one. While the archaeological record has been used to support or refute various aspects of the theories, and to provide a behavioural framework for different biological models, there has been little attempt to employ the evidence of stone tool technology to unravel phylogenetic relationships. Here we examine the evidence that the evolution of modern humans is integrally related to the development of the Upper Palaeolithic and similar technologies, and conclude that there is only a weak relationship. In contrast there is a strong association between the evolution and spread of modern humans and Grahame Clark's Mode 3 technologies (the Middle Stone Age/Palaeolithic). The implications of this for the evolution of Neanderthals, the multiple pattern of human dispersals, and the nature of cognitive evolution, are considered.

The evolution of Western Pueblo ritual has long been a focus of ethnographic and archaeological research in the American Southwest. Most of these studies emphasize the continuities between the late prehistoric period and the early historic era and highlight the role of katsina ritual in promoting social harmony or controlling weather and fertility. We suggest that a more complete understanding of ritual change during this time span requires a closer examination of the highly dynamic social landscape of the the thirteenth through eighteenth centuries. In particular, we suggest that the increasing evidence for raiding, conflict, and social opposition must be incorporated into new models of social and ritual change.

This study takes as its point of departure recent discussions in sociology, anthropology, queer theory, and masculinist and feminist studies on the contextual constitution of sex and gender, with its surrounding debates. We explore the adoption and implications of the body as a phenomenon in archaeology and its connection to power-centred theories. As a case study, we use a body of data comprised of prehistoric Cypriot figurines (Chalcolithic and Bronze Age), and suggest that an archaeology of individuals may be possible in prehistoric contexts. In conclusion, we suggest that archaeologists move beyond rigid, binary categorizations and attempt to prioritize specific discourses of difference by implementing constructions of self or identity

The last underground room at Pergouset is engraved with a variety of signs and a series of unreal, or distorted, animal figures that are presented as variations on several themes. These fantastic creations are the Pergouset monsters. A few similar depictions are known mostly from nearby caves, but as a group the Pergouset monsters are unparalleled in Franco-Cantabrian art. The engravings of Room IV contrast with the conventional Upper Palaeolithic animal depictions found in the three preceding rooms but the use of particular tricks of depiction, as much as the style of certain figures, makes it likely that the same artist drew both conventional figures and monsters. Conditions in the cave suggest that few, if any, visitors reached this last room. In the light of these circumstances the authors consider possible explanations for the occurrence of the monster engravings and their implications.

In the search for cognition in the mute record of archaeology the record of ancient thought transmitted to us by early written texts is an obvious but underexploited resource. An examination of the classification of stones in Mesopotamia gives a rare opportunity to match textual information with the archaeological record, and offers some insights into the organization of thought and classification of knowledge by one of the first literate societies.A group of unshaped stones in the corner of a grave under the floor of a Sumerian dwelling attests to an awareness of natural properties as distinct from functions, whether or not these concepts were already formulated in words. The group of various stones also hints at the concept of a class, the first stirring of a mindset which percolates through Plato and Aristotle to Linnaeus. Already in c. 2000 BC the essential properties of some of these stones were conceptualized and described in a ‘literary’ composition, and the concept of a stable set of properties is linked to traditions relating to the proper source of a stone. Later still, maybe around 1000 BC, the Mesopotamian scribes created a lapidary or ‘Handbook of Stones’ which provides an ordered key to stones in respect of their appearance. Then, or later, the description of their appearance was supplemented by details in which their natural or physical properties were distinguished, along with magical properties some of which were probably transmitted to the Hellenistic world.

Carl Jung's analytic ideas on archetypes offer an approach to interpreting ancient meanings in the absence of historic records. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are said to maintain a uniformitarian consistency over time in form and meaning. Their recurrent expression in the vernacular arts, dreams, even film of recent times permits exploration of these same archetypes in ancient contexts. The theory is discussed and applied to three landscapes, archetypal landscapes of glacial wasteland, primordial sea and forest labyrinth.

This article discusses some aspects of the way the ancient Egyptians classified their world. The Egyptian method of representation aimed at showing things as they existed in the imagination of the artist who accordingly rendered them as they ‘really were’, and not as they were seen, that is, without having recourse to foreshortening, shadow, perspective. What is stored is a mental image of the prototype or ‘genus’ of the object. Linguistic and pictorial material provide evidence of the existence of inalienable properties of a given mental picture. Another set of components is the interactional properties. Both are grounded in the basic experience of the perceptual, motor and intellectual apparatus of the body. Their distribution is overlapping, because the factual inalienability of its own members is one of the first experiences of a child. While some aspects of the conceptual system and categorization grow out of this immediate experience, others can only be understood in terms of other types of experience, such as metaphors in the sense of Lakoff and Johnson. Hieroglyphs and art are discussed in terms of the notion of metaphorical structuring.

Although they are some of the most impressive archaeological monuments in North America, the geometric earthworks of Ohio Hopewell remain poorly understood. By incorporating multiple lines of ethnographic and archaeological evidence an interpretation of the meanings congealed in these ancient earthworks can be offered.

The recent discovery of open-air rock engravings in the Côa valley of northern Portugal has been followed by a vigorous debate over their true age. On grounds of style and of stylistic parallels, many rock art specialists attribute the Côa engravings (and similar carvings at a handful of other sites in Iberia and southern France) to the Upper Palaeolithic, contemporary with the more famous cave art ofLascaux and elsewhere. Attempts so far to date the Côa engravings by scientific techniques have produced relatively recent age estimates for this art. Robert Bednarik has been among the strongest proponents of such a recent date, and in this noe he seeks to explain how the Côa art could be Holocene, or even late Holocene, yet still bear striking stylistic resemblance to carvings or other representations of known Palaeolithic age. In the spirit of the debate, we have invited three rock art experts to comment on Bednarik's theory of artistic continuity, and have appended his own reply to these responses.

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.

Last year saw the publication of two major studies on the evolution of the human mind, Human Evolution, Language and Mind by William Noble and Iain Davidson, and The Prehistory of the Mind by Steven Mithen. Both draw on a number of disciplines including archaeology, psychology, philosophy and animal ethology, but their resulting scenarios of human development differ in several important respects. The question of mind is central to our understanding of the origin of humanness. As Noble and Davidson put it, ‘the mark of modern human behaviour is its self-consciousness, its “mindedness”’. They trace the origin of this behaviour back no further than 100,000 years ago. In Noble and Davidson's view, the behaviours of the ancestors of humans were similar in crucial respects to those of modern non-human primates. Mithen, on the other hand, ‘cannot accept … that language did not appear in a gradual fashion’. Mithen proposes a series of distinct intelligences, and puts forward a modular theory of the evolution of the human mind. In the following pages we present the issues in the form of a debate, inviting each of the three authors to review each other's books and then offering them the opportunity to defend their alternative standpoints. We begin with Mithen's review of Noble and Davidson, then Noble and Davidson's review of Mithen, and finish with their respective replies to the comments and criticisms which have been raised.