This article examines Middle and Late Preclassic period ritual activity and caches discovered in the Central E Group complex at the ancient Maya site of Cival, which is located in northeastern Peten, Guatemala. It focuses on a series of excavations conducted in 2013 and 2014 at Structure 9, the E Group's western radial pyramid and uses theories of social memory and sacred place to provide insight into the recently discovered caches, termination rituals, and the deliberate destruction of architectural features found there. It also draws on previous ritual activity conducted in the Central E Group plaza and the site's broader history to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the role of this complex as a sacred place and hub of memory at Cival for more than 1,000 years.

A key question in the management of group-housed captive animals is how long can an individual be removed from a social group and still be reintroduced with minimal social upheaval. In order to answer this question we require a knowledge of how long cage-mates, following a specified period of group-housing, can remember one another after separation. This issue was investigated in laboratory rats (Rattus norvegicus). Rats were group-housed for 18 days before being housed individually. One hour, 48 hr, and 96 hr after separation, they were exposed simultaneously to odour cues originating from unfamiliar rats and from former cage-mates. The rats spent significantly more time investigating the unfamiliar odour 1 hr and 48 hr, but not 96 hr, after separation, suggesting that, after 18 days of group-housing, juvenile rats remember former cage-mates for between 48 and 96 hr. The implications of this result for animal welfare are discussed.

On the basis of Pierre Nora's theory of generations, this article re-examines the relationship between Luke's work and the so-called ‘Pastoral Letters’. From this perspective, informed by the sociology of memory, the article analyses the affinities between these two traditions not as the traces of a community of author(s), but rather as the expressions of a memorial consciousness under construction: that of a foundational past identified with the generation of the apostles.

This article explores how the memory of the conquest of Shang and the rise of the first Zhou kings was transmitted during the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty, specifically as it was reflected in inscriptions on excavated bronze vessels and bells from the Western Zhou period (ca. mid-eleventh to early eighth century b.c.e.). Approaching these inscribed objects and their texts from the perspective of the theories of social memory and cultural memory reveals that commemorating the foundational past of the dynasty became part of an intentional policy of the Zhou royal house as early as the first half of the tenth century b.c.e. It demonstrates that by the mid-tenth century b.c.e., a stable narrative emphasizing Kings Wen 文 and Wu 武 as the founding fathers of the Zhou dynasty was established at the expense of King Cheng 成, whose role was gradually downplayed following the general logic of lineage organization, according to which the commemoration of the earliest common ancestors serves as the foundation of corporate integrity in a network of patrilineally related families. It shows that most of the men who included such commemorations in inscriptions indeed belonged to the royal patrilineal network, wherein they occupied the highest positions. It further exemplifies that the royal house cultivated the memory of the first kings using various media, including rituals, utensils, royal speeches, and inscriptions. From the analysis of such inscriptions, we can infer that that the foundational memory of the Zhou dynasty was usually reactivated in the context of political negotiations, some of which included addressing lineage outsiders. Finally, it shows that both the royal house and other metropolitan lineages modified the foundational narrative according to their current needs. This article thus contributes both to tracing the roots of the early Chinese historiographic tradition and to understanding memory production in a society as an ongoing process of negotiations and adaptations.

Although we, as archaeologists, recognize the value in teaching nonprofessionals about our discipline and the knowledge it generates about the human condition, there are few of these specialists compared to the number of archaeologists practicing today. In this introductory article to the special section titled “Touching the Past to Learn the Past,” we suggest that, because of our unique training as anthropologists and archaeologists, each of us has the potential to contribute to public archaeology education. By remembering our archaeological theory, such as social memory, we can use the artifacts we engage with on a daily basis to bridge the disconnect between what the public hopes to gain from our interactions and what we want to teach them. In this article, we outline our perspective and present an overview of the other three articles in this section that apply this approach in their educational endeavors.

The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.

In spring 1999, amidst a wider ethnic cleansing campaign, Serb police forces abducted Ferdonije Qerkezi’s husband and four sons, who were never to be seen alive again. She subsequently transformed her private house into a memorial to the lost normalcy of her entire social world. We trace this memorialization process; her struggle for recognition; her transformation into an iconic mother of the nation and her activism, both for missing persons and against the internationally-driven Serb-Albanian normalization process in Kosovo. From a multi-disciplinary perspective, we critically reflect on the theoretical concept of “normative divergence” in intervention studies. We are guided by social anthropological (including immersive, historical-ethnographic, and semantic) analysis of the core tropes of social memory as both narratively and materially embodied by the House Museum. In systematically juxtaposing these to the normative transitional justice principles of truth, justice, non-recurrence, and reparations, and the overarching international intervention goal of reconciliation, we critically interrogate normative divergence per se. The ethnographic “thick description” of this case study—cognizant of context contingency, victims’ agency and experience, cultural change, and social transformation—points to divergent meanings of these principles as resulting directly from the political and institutional failure to provide key transitional justice goals.

This article draws upon ethnographic research which was conducted among young Cossacks (members of officially registered and informal Cossack clubs) in southern Russia. It presents young people's participation in the Cossack “nativism” as a physical and material mode of socialization into the mnemonic community. The research puts forward an argument that such corporal and sensorial experiences is effective in recruiting some young members to the Cossack movement. At the same time, the performative character of neo-Cossack identity destabilizes contemporary Cossacks' claims of authenticity related to the status of the legitimate heirs of historical Cossackdom. At the more general level of discussion this paper juxtaposes bodily activities, social memory, and revivalist discourses.

In the case of Croatia, sport has proved to be a highly politicized form of national expression, functioning as a salient social field in which its “national habitus codes” are most intensively articulated, debated, and contested. An incident emblematizing this argument occurred on 19 November 2013, when the Croatian national football team secured their qualification for the 2014 Football World Cup in Brazil. In front of the 25,000 people at Zagreb's Maksimir stadium, the national team player, Josip Simunić, grabbed the microphone and “greeted” all four stands with a loud chanting of Za dom (For the home(land)), to which the stands thunderously responded spremni (ready), the official salute of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist WWII quisling-state. This paper argues that the issue extends beyond politically radicalized football hooligans and has to be understood from the standpoint of “social memory.” By focusing on football, the article scrutinizes debates in the Croatian public sphere dealing with the salute Za dom – spremni. Providing an insight into its complex and multi-layered nature, this paper illustrates that Croatian football has to be understood as a field in which social memory is prominently constructed, heatedly articulated, and powerfully disseminated.

This article examines the wide range of grave disturbance practices seen in Viking-age burials across Scandinavia. It argues that the much-debated reopenings at high-profile sites, notably the Norwegian ‘royal’ mounds, should be seen against a background of widespread and varied evidence for burial reworking in Scandinavia throughout the first-millennium AD and into the Middle Ages. Interventions into Viking-age graves are interpreted as disruptive, intended to derail practices of memory-creation set in motion by funerary displays and monuments. However, the reopening and reworking of burials were also mnemonic citations in their own right, using a recurrent set of practices to make heroic, mythological, and genealogical allusions. The retrieval of portable artefacts was a key element in this repertoire, and in this article I use archaeological and written sources to explore the particular concepts of ownership which enabled certain possessions to work as material citations appropriating attributes of dead persons for living claimants.

The significance of place attachment for later life has been convincingly demonstrated. Scholars have offered useful models that help account for the depth of feeling bound up in place attachment in later life, how this attachment is achieved, and its relevance for belonging and identity. To date, however, this focus has largely been on the individual level of experience. This article draws on sociological and anthropological perspectives to consider how place attachment is forged and experienced in dynamic interaction with other entities and other processes: how place attachment is also a collective, relational and embodied process, caught up and experienced via social memory practices and sensorial, bodily knowledge. This resonates with and contributes to the ‘relational turn’ which has attracted burgeoning interest in the larger home disciplines of sociology, human geography and anthropology, and reciprocally helps them extend and build their interaction with critical ageing studies. In making this argument, I draw on two periods of anthropological, ethnographic participant-observation that I conducted in a semi-rural village in the former coalfields in South Yorkshire, England.

This article addresses the various mechanisms by which the religious figure of the Christian martyr became a useful notion in Argentine political discourse. It argues that the process by which the idea of the ‘martyr’ was secularised and politicised was actually initiated by religious agents themselves. The analysis considers how commemoration initiatives devised by religious agents, social movements and political actors have brought ‘Catholic martyrs’ into the pantheon of national symbols. It also deals with the various semantic shifts seen in the public discourses of religious agents themselves, shifts that extend the boundaries of an eminently religious category by associating it with other figures in a more specifically political imaginary, such as that of the hero and the victim. The article shows how the political power of the religious figure of the martyr lay in the way various actors could use it to invoke the image of a legitimate and heroic victim of political violence. It thus allowed those actors to sidestep the vexed public question of whether those being commemorated had had any involvement in armed struggle.

After discussing the scholarly preference for dating Jesus' crucifixion to 7 April 30 CE, this article argues that the precise date can no longer be recovered. All we can claim with any degree of historical certainty is that Jesus died some time around Passover (perhaps a week or so before the feast) between 29 and 34 CE. The emergence of the Johannine tradition (in which Jesus died on the day of Preparation) and the Markan tradition (in which Jesus died on the Passover itself) are explored through the lens of social/collective memory.

This article argues that John 7.15 claims neither literacy nor illiteracy for Jesus, but rather that Jesus was able to confuse his opponents with regards to his scribal literacy. According to the Johannine narrator, Jesus' opponents assumed he did not ‘know letters’, but also acknowledged that he taught as if he did. This article also suggests that the claim of John 7.15 is historically plausible in light of first-century Christianity's corporate memory(ies) of Jesus' literacy.

For archaeologists, stratification is an important character of archaeological deposits. Through it, layering is discerned and cultural and evolutionary interpretations are proposed. Archaeologists possess much implicit knowledge about the social practices that produce stratigraphic sequence and the specific, contextualized manner in which layers were built upon or cut into previous deposits. The aim of this paper is to gather together and formalize this knowledge so as to codify conceptual ‘tools to think by’ when recording and interpreting stratigraphy. Relevant literature is widely dispersed and here can only be sampled; authors consider stratigraphy in terms of (1) techniques of terraforming, (2) processes enacted and (3) meaning and interpretation. Techniques and processes are discussed within larger social interpretations such as memory, history-building, forgetting, renewing, cleansing and destroying. Examples are drawn from the Turkish Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük and the ancestral Maya site of K'axob in Belize, Central America, to illustrate the applicability of an approach that here is called ‘social stratigraphy’. A practice-based history of stratigraphy – the recording and interpretation of strata – within archaeology is problematized in reference to codependence with geology, the deployment of labour and centralized authority within the emergent 19th- to early 20th-century field of archaeology. The contributions of and conflicts between British and American stratigraphic schools are considered in light of a potential rapprochement. Contested issues of cultural heritage – such as preservation of selected strata – suggest that thinking about stratigraphic sequence in social terms is more than an academic exercise.