Defensive and fortified settlements are often places of relatively dense nucleation by people with few viable alternatives, resulting in the imperative need to establish consensual rules for living together. What behaviours and attitudes were adopted in defensively nucleated places? Recent investigations at Ayawiri (Machu Llaqta), a densely settled hillfort town of the western Titicaca Basin of Peru inhabited c. ad 1300–1450, shed light on the nature of social life within the defensive community and the workings of social distinction, priority in settlement, conformity and publicity. I draw on the evidence from Ayawiri to discuss how defensive settlements create and reinforce certain ways of living by reformulating the basic logics of sociality and the material and spatial realms through which they work.

Western Zhou archaeology (1046–771 bc) is dominated by cemetery- and mortuary-related data. To date most studies have relied on later historical narratives and focused on the investigation of elites and their mortuary practices. This paper sets out to provide a renewed approach to the study of Western Zhou cemeteries by looking at the graveyard as a whole and with it the relationship between the commoners and nobles who were buried in them. Its case study is the important site of Tianma-Qucun, located in modern-day Shanxi province, the residential site and burial ground of the Jin state during the Western Zhou period. We provide a community-focused study of mortuary practices aimed at uncovering local-specific shared ways of doings things. This approach not only affords a refined vision of Western Zhou mortuary ritual and practice, but also one where local variation and appropriations can be appreciated as well. Thus, while common Zhou mortuary traditions should be understood to have been of greater import to Zhou elites, their impact on the lower echelons of society remains less clear. By examining the mortuary practices of individual communities, we aim to uncover these site-specific manifestations in their larger contexts.

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.

Early depictions of anthropomorphs in rock art provide unique insights into life during the deep past. This includes human engagements with the environment, socio-cultural practices, gender and uses of material culture. In Australia, the Dynamic Figure rock paintings of Arnhem Land are recognized as the earliest style in the region where humans are explicitly depicted. Important questions, such as the nature and significance of body adornment in rock art and society, can be explored, given the detailed nature of the human figurative art and the sheer number of scenes depicted. In this paper, we make a case for Dynamic Figure rock art having some of the earliest and most extensive depictions of complex anthropomorph scenes found anywhere in the world.

Education is notoriously difficult to identify archaeologically, but crucial for understanding the inner workings of any society. Strikingly, in Mesoamerican archaeology, more seems to be known about the transmission of crafting skills than about practices of statecraft. Elsewhere in the ancient world, much evidence speaks to various social and institutional contexts in which specialized knowledge of histories, literacies, civics, and sciences was generated and taught as vital to state-making projects. Yet these same contexts among the Classic Period Maya (ad 200–900) remain poorly understood and under-theorized. Pulling from comparative research alongside recent work at the site of Xultun, Guatemala, this article explores how educational systems may have worked in Classic-era Maya polities—assessing evidence for educational loci, the different forms that education might assume, and the varied curricula that likely existed across different cities and particular demographics. Through this discussion, I seek to shed some light on the actors, gendered exclusions and diverse arrangements of pedagogy in Maya society, and grant further insight into how specialized bodies of knowledge (transmitted within formal educational institutions) were built into the very fabric of the Classic Maya states of which they were part.

Burial grounds are increasingly being considered as components of lived urban environments in the past. This paper considers how the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten, built by king Akhenaten (c. 1349–1332 bc), was constructed and experienced as a space inhabited both by the living and the dead. Drawing upon results from ongoing excavations at the burial grounds of the general population, it considers how the archaeological record of the settlement and its cemeteries segue and explores how the nature of burial landscapes and the need to maintain reflexive relationships between the living and the dead in the midst of a changing religious milieu contributed to the unique character of Akhetaten as a city. It asks what kind of city Akhetaten was, and what it was like to live through the Amarna period.

Soils provide a striking demonstration of conviviality, thanks to the intensity and abundance of lively interaction seething within them. Soils constitute and generate life precisely through the symbiotic interaction, collaboration and competition of an enormous range of partners. Engaging with some specific soils in central Cyprus demonstrates how this conviviality works. Soil-places are created by very precise combinations of soil players, both non-human and human. Humans can join these partners in helping the soil to grow, through constructions of check dams to catch sediments and moisture. They can use soil to construct houses, demonstrating deep local knowledge and close partnership with the soils, and often recognizing the conviviality that provides a foundation for their lives in the landscape. As our soils today are catastrophically degraded and lost, the need to engage with the conviviality of soil is all the more urgent.

The old are rarely the focus of research in archaeology. Older skeletonized bodies are hard to give a chronological age, and this seems to justify the lack of research focus. In this paper I argue that the old are not naturally invisible to archaeologists, but have been made so by a focus on chronology at the expense of the bodily and by our ambivalence towards the ageing process. I suggest that, rather than applying numbers to skeletons, we should focus our research on understanding the ageing of the body itself in archaeological contexts, and the relationships between processes of continuity and processes of decline. This is achieved through analysis of four aspects of embodied ageing: changes in appearance; in bodily function; in age-related disease; and in skill. The ageing body is not invisible: it is present, variable and a rich resource for future archaeological analyses.