On the assumption that Magdalenian mobiliary art is the bearer of certain technical traditions which express cognitive and cultural values, research is directed towards the identification and appreciation of these values through the understanding of techniques involved in bone engraving. Examination of a set of 90 objects from sites in southwest France sheds light on repeated artistic activity and graphic ‘recipes’ which do not appear to be characteristic of local or regional groups. In the sequence of actions as well as in their final product, there is no activity specific to the Ariège as opposed to the Gironde. Magdalenian artists have identical shared artistic procedures.

Archaeological studies of specialized craft production in hierarchies often highlight the crucial roles of prestige goods in ancient political economies. Yet elaborate crafted items are also produced and circulated widely in heterarchically-ordered societies, where powerful elites are absent. In this latter case, attributing crafting to the agency of elites — or to the demands of political economy — is unconvincing. This article investigates the alternative cultural logic underlying crafting in heterarchies, seeking to understand both the contexts of crafting and the nature of the ‘social projects’ in which artisans were engaged. Expectations for archaeological signatures of craft activity are developed and applied to a case study, drawing upon recent excavations in northwest Argentina.

In this review and position paper we explore the neural substrates for manual specialization and their possible connection with language and speech. We focus on two contrasting hypotheses of the origins of language and manual specialization: the language-first scenario and the tool-use-first scenario. Each one makes specific predictions about hand-use in non-human primates, as well as about the necessity of an association between speech adaptations and population-level right-handedness in the archaeological and fossil records. The concept of handedness is reformulated for archaeologists in terms of manual role specialization, using Guiard's model of asymmetric bimanual coordination. This focuses our attention on skilled bimanual tasks in which both upper limbs play complementary roles. We review work eliciting non-human primate hand preferences in co-ordinated bimanual tasks, and relevant archaeological data for estimating the presence or absence of a population-level bias to the right hand as the manipulator in extinct hominin species and in the early prehistory of our own species.

The transition from the Acheulean to the Middle Palaeolithic represents a critical threshold in human evolution when archaic behaviour patterns gave way to the Levallois stone tool technology that characterizes later Pleistocene hominins including Homo neanderthalensis and early Homo sapiens. This article examines that transition through a comparative perspective on handaxes and cleavers (collectively referred to here as bifaces) from the site of Bhimbetka in central India. The Bhimbetka bifaces are compared to those from Patpara, another transitional assemblage in central India, as well as non-transitional Indian Acheulean assemblages. Bhimbetka and Patpara share unusually refined bifaces. While this refinement is attributed to invasive flaking at Patpara, at Bhimbetka it appears to be related to the ability to strike large thin flake blanks. These both have consequences for biface symmetry, with Patpara handaxes being particularly symmetrical in profile, while Bhimbetka cleavers are particularly symmetrical in section. Unlike Patpara, most of the Bhimbetka bifaces have not undergone resharpening. However, cleavers from the two sites do share unusually high rates of damage on their bits and the occasional use of cleavers as notches. It is argued that, while the transition at the two sites occurred independently, it was underpinned by the same cognitive pattern: an increased capacity for hierarchical organization.

Communal ceremonial sites and social groups often share mutually reinforcing and structuring properties. As a result of this dynamic relationship, ceremonial sites and social groups exhibit ever-emergent properties as long-term works-in-progress. Ceremonial kod sites featuring shrines of trumpet shells and dugong bones were central to the communal ritual life of Torres Strait Islanders. Continuously formed over the generations by ritual additions, these shrines were linked to ongoing maintenance, legitimization and cohesion of totemic clans and moieties that formed the structural basis of island communities. As such, understanding the history of kod sites provides an opportunity to investigate the historical emergence of ethnographically-known social groups in Torres Strait. This mutual emergence is investigated archaeologically at the kod on Pulu islet which is owned and operated by the Goemulgal people of nearby Mabuyag island. Multiple radiocarbon dates from shell and bone shrines and an underlying village midden indicate that the kod, and by association the Goemulgal and their totemic clan and moiety system, emerged over the past 400 years. Aided by local oral history and ethnography, it is argued further that establishment of the kod saw the status of Pulu change from a residential to a ceremonial and sacred place.

Studies of the prehistoric landscape are best suited to the analysis of sedentary communities with enclosed resources. Studies of prehistoric art show different limitations, especially an excessive subjectivity. This paper attempts to bring these areas of research together by considering the changing content of rock art in relation to topography, the movement of people in the cultural landscape, and the operation of specialized kinds of monument. The characteristic designs found in the open air are analyzed in terms of their organization and visual impact, and the results of this pilot study are employed in a more detailed assessment of the positioning of prehistoric petroglyphs in two areas of Neolithic/Early Bronze Age Britain: Northumberland and Mid Argyll.

It has been postulated that one difference between Neanderthals and anatomically modern people lies in a ‘clearer mental template’ of flaked stone tools on the part of modern people. This is thought to have been manifested in greater tool standardization during the Upper Palaeolithic than in the Middle Palaeolithic. Testing of this hypothesis, using three samples of a characteristic Upper Palaeolithic tool class — burins — from one Middle Palaeolithic and two Upper Palaeolithic assemblages, reveals that they are equally standardized for both metric and non-metric traits. Further consideration suggests that most Palaeolithic flaked stone tools are poorly suited to test notions of standardization, although some tool attributes may be well suited when considered in specific adaptive contexts.

Recent years have seen increasing interest in the experience of prehistoric monuments. This article explores the possibility that the construction and experience of early Neolithic chambered cairns in South Wales was grounded in principles of asymmetry and sidedness. This was reflected in their landscape setting, architecture, and was actively drawn on through time in patterns of structured deposition. Ultimately, we conclude that the differences between symmetry and asymmetry may have played an integral role in the conception of place in the British Neolithic.

The invention of ceramic objects made from fire-hardened clay represents an important and early step in the development of pyrotechnology. This paper examines pottery invention and innovation by hunter-gatherers in East Asia and by farmers in the Near East to examine how prehistoric communities in different socio-economic systems came to rely heavily on fired-clay containers. Drawing on advances in archaeological science, it examines from a comparative perspective early pottery's broader entanglements related to technology and use and argues that early pottery production by farmers in the Near East can be viewed as a process of innovation in a longer tradition of container technology, while the first hunter-gatherer pottery production in East Asia provides a better case for independent invention.

Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional cultural features, incorporates social context, and builds on earlier subsistence-focused studies of the shellmounds in order to better appreciate the meaning of the numerous human remains interred therein. A structural analysis is then used to show that the concepts of food and ancestors joined together at shellmounds, so much so that ritual attention to the ancestors was very likely regarded as essential to ensuring a continuing supply of food.

This study argues that people and things, through their interactions with each other, embody different agential capacities and that scholars should evaluate how they are variably effective at structuring the actions of others and at shaping society. This is attempted here through a study of dismembered body parts that, as I argue, remained socially and politically active even in their dismembered state. As such, we can begin to analyse them as embodying a categorically different kind of agency — post-mortem or secondary agency — while remaining cautious of overzealous attempts to claim that everyone and everything has agency of equivalence. Definitions of agency are examined and its definition within this article is explicitly formulated, drawing especially on ideas from Gell (1998), Robb (2004), Sewell (2005) and Latour (2005). Through a case study from the Peruvian Andes in which approximately 240 individuals were dismembered, I suggest that the primary agency once embodied in those living persons was transformed into secondary agency (Gell 1998) as the person-cum-corpse was remade into smaller body parts. These body parts and their placement in a ritually significant locale, had profound effects on the living, particularly as it related to the ways that those dead-body objects extended social relations and social hierarchies, making them more durable.

Exploring the long-term use of accounting practices and currencies by literate and numerate authorities contributes new information regarding the complexity of the political economy of ancient Maya society. Two forms of indirect, yet compelling, lines of evidence for accounting practices and currencies are presented in this article. First, we identify potential accounting devices (counting sticks and tokens) found in the tombs of royal scribes and nobles, based on the contextual associations and depicted uses of similar objects in Maya art such as polychrome vases and murals. Second, we argue that the long-term use and significant standardization of specific shell objects suggests their role as all-purpose monies, in addition to their complementary status as counting devices or numerical symbols. This paper addresses the intricate relationships between symbolism, value and multiple modes of exchange that have long been of interest to cross-cultural studies in anthropology.

Gender in the European Neolithic has seen little debate, despite major scholarly interest in identity and social relationships. This article considers how gender operated in the Linearbandkeramik (LBK, c. 5500–5000 cal. bc), the first farming culture of central Europe. A new theoretical approach is developed from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the feminist philosopher Braidotti, proposing that how difference and variation are conceived is an important element in how identity is experienced and performed. The concept of ‘difference-within-itself’ is introduced and applied to an assemblage of c. 2350 burials from the LBK via correspondence analysis. The results of this analysis are combined with variation in daily activities and health between male-sexed bodies and female-sexed bodies to argue that differences between males and females shaped lifeways in the LBK, providing different and varied ways of participating in social life. It is concluded that there was diversity and fluidity in female identities, while male identities had more limited possibilities and were subject to further social constraints. The implications of these gendered differences for models of LBK social organization are then considered.

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (MET), writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality and brains: movements of hands, arms and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components.

The British Iron Age had an enduring set of traditions involving the east– west axis of the sun's path, the sunwise progression of movement and the classification of animals. Although these traditions were manifested regionally in slightly different ways and were modified, contested and restructured during the Iron Age, they provide us with a key to unlock aspects of the symbolism and practices of daily life. The significance of westerly orientations and of pigs in embodying and expressing associations of high status and other social differences were principal features of a strongly hierarchical society whose social differences were otherwise largely muted in terms of material culture distinctions. The cemeteries of East Yorkshire provide a detailed insight into the ordering of these social differences which were, even then, only rarely expressed through grave goods and mortuary elaboration. The burials of the Yorkshire elite are suggestive of a conception of sacred leadership or kingship, which included the symbolic spearing of certain individuals. Animal offerings were used in the structuring of social differences, with pig portions and sheep bones marking thedead of elite and commoner groups respectively.

Based on more than a decade of research on the Taraco Peninsula, Titicaca Basin, Bolivia, we discuss the role of memory, tradition and ancestral participation from the earliest settled communities to the founding and influence of the Tiwanaku order. We examine the shifting role of social memory vis-à-vis public ceremonies, pottery and food production. While the earlier phases give a sense of familial community and the construction of place through ancestor veneration, the later phases suggest stronger lineage commemoration, with families acting as gravitational forces in the burgeoning political developments. Our diachronic study on the Taraco Peninsula tracks these practices illustrating the movement along a discursive–non-discursive continuum, with some practices brought to the surface and politicized.

This article examines aspects of social memory in the Aurignacian mobiliary art of southwest Germany. An analytical distinction is introduced between cultural and communicative memory with different characteristics and functions in Palaeolithic social life. It is argued that the statuettes are reflections of cultural memory, but also stood in a complex and unstable relationship with the flexible conditions of everyday life. The figurative objects are not passive reproductions of collective ideas. Rather, they have to be seen as products of an active individual and intense concern with the field of meanings and associations of cultural memory, and consequently represent individual variations of a socially shared meaningful ideology

This paper discusses the invention of gold metallurgy within the Southeast European Chalcolithic on the basis of newly investigated gold objects from the Varna I cemetery (4550–4450 cal. bc). Comprehensive analyses, including preceding gold finds, shed new light not only on the technical expertise of the so far earliest known fine metalworkers, but also on the general context and potential prerequisites in which the invention of gold metallurgy may be embedded. Here, these structural trajectories as well as the unprecedented inventions connected to this early gold working will be highlighted in order to contextualize the apparently sudden appearance and rapid development of this new craft.

The Minoan mountain peak sanctuary of Atsipadhes Korakias (Rethymnon, Crete) was excavated by the author in 1989. This article presents the first published account of that excavation and addresses its contribution to broader issues, methodological and interpretative, of Cretan Bronze Age religion. The spatial distribution of over 7500 finds was recorded, enabling the detailed reconstruction of the use and function of the sanctuary. This reconstruction is compared with other approaches to the identification of prehistoric cult places in Greece. Of the other excavated peak sanctuaries, the best known are élite sanctuaries associated with palatial centres; Atsipadhes Korakias is a poor, rural sanctuary, and offers a counterbalanced perspective on Minoan peak sanctuaries.

This article was presented as the third David Clarke Memorial Lecture at Peterhouse College, Cambridge University, 1997. It examines the role of religious ideology in the Aztec state. Ideology is often regarded as a means of easing tension between a dominant and a subordinate group. Ideology, however, might also serve as a mechanism for achieving unity within the dominant group so that it can control subordinates through direct coercion. State-sponsored religion occupied a prominent position in Aztec culture. But, did tribute-paying commoners accept the state's religious rationale for warfare, conquest, and sacrifice? Or was the message primarily directed to higher-status elites? Archaeological material from the Aztec Great Temple and from village sites in the Aztec hinterland are used to assess the role ofrelgion in Aztec political life.