This article presents a contextual analysis of stone materials from northwestern Argentina, produced at a time when sedentary life was unfolding throughout the region. It examines the circulation and use practices of everyday obsidian tools, as well as the technical and semantic relationships they established within the wider field of materials and artefacts that characterized the period. Arguing for a sensitive approach to the classificatory logic of past societies, it is proposed here that a particular hierarchy of stone artefacts of regional significance emerged during this period. After discussing anthropological value perspectives and their relevance to Andean archaeology, the article explores Andean conceptualizations of stone that can provide a culturally specific framework for understanding ancient stone materials. The final sections examine the technical and contextual practices involving with domestic stone tools, as well as how these were embedded in a wider landscape of physical and semantic relationships. It is hoped that this article will contribute to ongoing discussions on non-Western models of value and their relevance for understanding social interaction and complexity, both in the south-central Andes and beyond.

Recent archaeological research in the Southern Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, has revealed that the coastal massif of Cerro Cañoncillo was venerated as a powerful huaca (sacred entity) from the Late Formative into the Late Horizon Period. The main objective of the article is to argue that some of the major religious structures of the Late Formative site of Jatanca (500–100 bc) and the Moche ceremonial center of Huaca Colorada (ad 650–850) were built as direct simulators of the distinctive cerro in question. However, a comparison of the larger archaeological landscape of these two neighbouring centres permits a reconstruction of the changing political context and religious significance of the Cerro Cañoncillo cult, allowing us to move beyond generic generalizations of Andean religious architecture as mimetic mountains. An important goal of the article is to demonstrate that attention to the vagaries of ecology and place are essential for the interpretation of historical differences in past religious ideologies. Ultimately, an exploration of the changing mimetic faculty of monumental architecture at Cerro Cañoncillo will permit a critical reappraisal of the storied concept of the ‘ceremonial centre’ that should be of comparative value to archaeologists working in other regions of the world.

This paper discusses the emergence of silver metallurgy some two millennia ago in the south central Andes. It is argued that the availability of multiple abundant resources and a high population density were instrumental in the development of this complex technology. The potential for such resource-rich environments to stimulate and sustain innovation is briefly discussed, particularly for prestige goods in societies engaged in socially competitive networks. The Puno Bay area of Lake Titicaca and its hinterland is shown to be one such resource-rich region, which may have contributed to its role in developing a complex and labour-intensive silver metallurgy as part of a larger mining-metallurgical landscape.

The Neolithic period bore witness to the emergence of novel engagements between humans and the material world. In the Middle East, these interactions were important components of broader social and ritual developments which came about with the rise of sedentary communities. In this paper, we examine the significance of these processes as represented by elaborate flint daggers at the site of Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia. Detailed analyses of the manufacture, use and deposition of these items indicate that they were central nodes in multiple social and material relations, and functioned as durable facets of Çatalhöyük's artisanal social fabric. Their presence at the apogee of Çatalhöyük's ritual florescence further identifies their importance to particular segments of the community. Studying the intentionality of dagger production and use, we conclude, allows us to comment on the particulars of material milieu in shaping the social networks necessary for the development of large-scale sedentary communities.

In archaeological considerations of Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes, trackways are usually interpreted in purely normative terms, merely as means of getting from one settlement to another, or as functional features to assist with the herding of animals. In these somewhat static expositions, the role of trackways as places in themselves, and their long-term importance in constructions of social identity and memory, are often overlooked, as are the complex relationships between people and animals within the landscape. Recent theoretical ideas concerning relational agency and identity, materiality and movement have much to offer in terms of our archaeological understandings of these features. This paper explores the interpretative potential of such approaches using case studies of Iron Age and Romano-British trackways from Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Integrating theories of identity, embodiment, materiality, relationality and practice highlights the sedentarism of previous explanations, and allows for much more nuanced accounts of highly dynamic, mobile meshworks, where agency resided in complex constraints and affordances between people, animals and the materiality of the lived-in landscape.

During the last two decades, the use of network methodologies in archaeological studies of interaction has gradually emerged. In this paper I will explore the social significance of networks, advocating the explicit use of Marxist-inspired social theory to increase our understanding of the patterns recognized through graph-theory. Crucial in this will be the new concepts of Means, Relations and Modes of Interaction and the Gramscian notion of hegemony. I will illustrate the potential of this approach, through a case study based in MBA and LBA southern Italy, focused on the sharing of stylistic features in pottery from Apulia in a period when the region was one of the loci of interaction with Minoan/Mycenaean Greece. Local pottery networks show the existence of intense interaction since the early phases of the MBA, before the main period of contact with the Aegean world. It is argued that such networks were influenced by the growing Aegean presence in the region and the overall hegemony of this wide cultural component. Through the later phases of the Late Bronze Age the level of local interaction further increases, while at the same time Aegean-type pottery almost disappears, suggesting a less hegemonic role for Aegean groups involved and a re-balancing of interaction.

The use of apotropaic practices, that is, of magic to protect against evil, is sometimes included in archaeological interpretations on the basis of similarities between archaeological objects and objects used in historically documented or present-day apotropaic practices. The present article attempts to develop the archaeological study of apotropaism by focussing on apotropaic ritual, in addition to apotropaic devices. The case study is a burial in ad 834 of a high-ranking Viking Age woman in the Norwegian Oseberg ship grave. Drawing on cognitive magic ritual theory, the study focuses on identifying both a repeated ritual core and a counter-intuitive, magic element in the series of actions that led to the deposition of five elaborately carved wooden animal heads in the burial, each combined with a rattling device probably related to horse driving. The study demonstrates that apotropaism provides a viable explanation for this rather puzzling aspect of the burial. In a wider perspective it emphasizes the importance of the contextual, in addition to the functional, interpretation of objects in graves. It also suggests that the use of animal figures and animal style in Viking Age artwork may have been more intimately connected with apotropaic beliefs than previously suggested.

The ethnographic data of the Bleek-Lloyd archive pertaining to the ǀXam Bushmen (San) of the Karoo have been marshalled to great effect in developing understandings of Bushman rock art throughout southern Africa, with implications for archaeological interpretations of hunter-gatherer rock arts worldwide. Rock art from their homelands, however, has received comparatively little attention, and obvious historical content—which would tie the art to the socio-cultural milieu of the Bleek-Lloyd informants—has occasioned relatively little comment. This paper returns to one site (the Strandberg) known to have been a prominent feature in the cultural landscape of the ǀXam to explore the historical imagery present there, examining the ways in which this art demonstrates the ongoing vitality of certain aspects of ǀXam life in the face of the dramatic socio-cultural changes experienced by these groups from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. The paper investigates the range of potential authors for the art, and looks at the context of its production within the expansion of global markets, violent interactions and shifting subsistence options that characterized the late nineteenth-century Northern Cape.