Archaeology is centrally concerned with the tension between material remains in the present and a reconstructed past. This tension is captured by the concept of a trace, namely a contemporary phenomenon that references the past through some sort of epistemic intervention. Traces are deceptively complex in terms of both their epistemology and their ontology and hence worthy of detailed exploration. In particular, archaeological traces not only concern the past per se but also possess a latent quality of as yet unrealized signification. This gives archaeological traces a future orientation that is rarely considered in discussions of archaeological epistemology.

Handaxes have a uniquely prominent role in the history of Palaeolithic archaeology, and their early study provides crucial information concerning the epistemology of the field. We have little conclusive evidence, however, of their investigation or societal value prior to the mid seventeenth century. Here we investigate the shape, colour and potential flake scarring on a handaxe-like stone object seen in the Melun Diptych, painted by the French fifteenth-century artist Jean Fouquet, and compare its features with artefacts from diverse (including French) Acheulean handaxe assemblages. Commissioned by a high-status individual, Étienne Chevalier, Fouquet's work (Étienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen) depicts an important religious context, while the handaxe-like object points to the stoning to death of an important Christian saint. Our results strongly support the interpretation that the painted stone object represents a flint Acheulean handaxe, likely sourced from northern France, where Fouquet lived. Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world.

Early representational art seems to tell a story all of its own, but in reality, it depended on the oral stories that accompanied its production. The art system has four parts: the producer, the subject of the story, the images of that subject, and the seer. Through the stories of the producer and the seers, this system implicated members of society in ways that were not limited to the images produced. By tying those stories to particular places, rock art influenced society more broadly through foraging choices and ritual. Because the persisting marks of rock art necessarily required storytelling, the stories penetrated the mental lives of people in the society. Interwoven with these considerations is the observation that for archaeologists, the producer, the stories and the original seers are gone and all that is left is the material of the rock art and the archaeologist. Writing archaeohistory from these materials requires interpretation in light of the archaeological evidence distributed across both space and time. One way of interpreting archaeohistory suggests that rock art played a significant role in cognitive evolution through its engagement in ritual.

The focus of this article is the pyramid belonging to king Unis, last king of the 5th Dynasty. The striking feature of this pyramid is its ornate internal decoration with spells/utterances from the Pyramid Texts, and with the palace façade motif around the king's sarcophagus. The Pyramid Texts, one of the oldest examples of religious literature in the world, appear here for the first time. To date, research has generally focused on the language and content of the Pyramid Texts. This article looks beyond the subject matter of the Pyramid Texts to explore how these early hieroglyphic writings had additional integral symbolism embedded in their parietal format. Using a novel perspective that seeks symbolic connections across textual and non-textual elements, I argue that the Pyramid Texts and the palace façade motif, through their architectural format, represent the boundaries of the cosmos, which is itself the main theme in the Pyramid Texts.

The fact that 10 notable scholars have taken the time to examine my book Against the Grain and provide thoughtful commentary is a form of flattery of which I am acutely conscious and very grateful. This would be the case even if their comments had ben totally damning! I braced myself for the onslaught of a phalanx of archaeologists justifiably indignant that a rank amateur should even dare trespass on their turf. When invited to reply to such a symposium convened by the CAJ, the thought crossed my mind that I was being brought to the symposium in the same spirit as the Romans ‘invited’ the Christians to the Coliseum. Happily, while there are gashes, bruises and perhaps a life-threatening wound or two, much of my argument seems to have come through the encounter. One or two of the commentators, I understand, believe they left me for dead!

This paper presents an experiment. Can a typologically inarticulate assemblage be accounted for by other means? What might such an articulation look like? What prospects would it offer? Focusing on three small late Pottery Neolithic assemblages from the southern Levant, the paper argues that they are typologically inarticulate, primarily because they possess considerable morphological fluidity that is at odds with the segmented structure demanded by this mode of classification. The paper presents an attempt to formulate an account of these assemblages that incorporates their morphological fluidity and ambiguity. Allowing for differential quantitative emphases across the assemblage, it is suggested that certain forms may be specified as types. In turn, the relations among these types are shown to constitute a structural order. Yet the assemblages are also fundamentally ambivalent, both constituting and de-constituting their order and logic. For the types are constituted in relative (rather than absolute) terms and the orderly structures are accompanied by elements that are incommensurable with it. Acknowledging these conflicting qualities, it is proposed that they are multiple, that the one assemblage is several. Finally, the paper explores some implications this understanding of the ceramic assemblages might have for the discussion of temporal development.

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.

Much detail regarding the early development of stone architecture in Egypt remains unclear. Prevailing studies tend to focus on the contribution of religious and socio-economic factors, but the role of environmental elements should not be understated. For much of the First Dynasty, innovation in stone architecture was driven by developments in the private realm, a result of favourable geology in Lower Egypt. Meanwhile, multiple strands of evidence suggest that Egypt experienced wetter climatic conditions during the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom. This would have had major implications on both the production of mudbrick and the short-term durability of mudbrick structures. It is argued that these environmental factors played a key role in facilitating and accelerating the rise of stone architecture in Egypt.

A unique gold finger ring, dated stylistically to c.ad 580–650, was discovered by metal-detecting in Essex in 2011. The ‘northwest Essex Anglo-Saxon ring’ is highly decorated with Style II art and shows a distinctive juxtaposition of ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ imagery including birds of prey and an anthropomorphic figure holding a long cross in the right hand, a raptor in the left. In this article, I consider the possibility that the object provides further evidence that falconry was practised in early Anglo-Saxon England. I begin by examining the finger ring itself and the imagery upon it, situating this within an Anglo-Saxon and broader Continental context. I then explore the possible social context of the ring, focusing on the ‘ideology of predation’ within which falconry, as a high-status hunting pursuit, may have been performed. Evaluating the hybrid ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ elements of the imagery, I suggest that falconry, and the ring itself as a high-status and possibly royal object, may have played important roles in the dynamics of pagan–Christian ‘discursive space’.

The processes leading to the formation of early state societies remain one of the key topics of archaeological research. Few of these early states are as famous or evocative as that of ancient Egypt, a land of dramatic monuments and terrain, with mysterious and exotic religious practices and a distinctive and exotic iconography. But was Egypt the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus alleged? In this new book, Toby Wilkinson draws attention to a relatively neglected part of the Egyptian landscape: not the fertile river valley, but the deserts which fringe it to east and west. It is here in the deserts, he argues, that the origins of the Egyptian state are to be found. In recent millennia, the deserts have been hostile environments of rock and sand. Go back before 3000 bc, however, and a rather different picture emerges. This different picture is of a desert hinterland peopled by nomadic groups who spent part of their year in the Nile valley. It suggests a more mobile view of Egyptian Predynastic society than has usually been supposed. Desert and valley may have functioned together in a classic pattern of complementarity between contrasting environmental zones, with cattle herds perhaps moved from valley floor to desert in step with the cyclical pattern of the seasons. The specific ingredient which Wilkinson uses to link valley and desert during the fourth millennium bc is rock art. Egyptian rock art has not yet been properly recognized as a rich and important repertoire by specialists in the burgeoning field of rock art as whole. Surveys over more than a century, however, have revealed numerous groups of pecked and engraved images on the desert cliffs and boulders, and recent expeditions (including those by Wilkinson himself) are continually adding to the corpus. The Egyptian desert rock art is generally less well-known than the vivid rock paintings of the central Sahara (such as the famous Tassili frescoes), though it too conveys the image of a greener more habitable landscape. Wilkinson ties specific motifs found in the desert rock art to iconography from the Nile valley during the fourth millennium and later. Yet the linkages and chronologies remain controversial, along with the central hypothesis. Did the desiccation of the savannas lead to the formation of the Egypt, forcing the scattered pastoralist populations to withdraw to a cultivated Nile valley? Was Egypt the gift of the deserts, not the Nile? In this Review Feature the hypothesis is examined by specialists working in Egypt and Nubia, and the reliability of the supporting evidence is assessed.

The Bronze to Iron Age transition in Crete, a period of state collapse and insecurity, saw the island's rugged, high-contrast topography used in striking new ways. The visual drama of many of the new site locations has stimulated significant research over the last hundred years, with explanation of the change as the main focus. The new sites are not monumental in character: the vast majority are settlements, and much of the information about them comes from survey. Perhaps as a result, the new site map has not been much studied from phenomenological perspectives. A focus on the visual and experiential aspects of the new landscape can offer valuable insights into social structures at this period, and illuminate social developments prefiguring the emergence of polis states in Crete by c. 700 bc. To develop, share and evaluate this type of integrated study, digital reconstructive techniques are still under-used in this region. I highlight their potential value in addressing a regularly-identified shortcoming of phenomenological approaches — their necessarily subjective emphasis.

The first millennium bc brought warfare to the interior of Egypt on a significant scale. We have two vivid records, one written and the other pictorial. The former is a first-person narrative of the Napatan (Sudanese) king Piankhy who, having gained control of the south of Egypt, embarked in 730 bc on a methodical subjugation of the rest of the country, then under the rule of several local families. During the seemingly irresistible northward progress of his army Piankhy makes frequent reference to walls with battlements and gates which could be countered with siege towers/battering rams and the erection of earthen ramps, although Piankhy himself preferred the tactic of direct storming. Within the circuit of these walls lay treasuries and granaries and, in the case of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, the palace of the local king Nemlut together with its stables for horses.