Since the 1980s, archaeologists have challenged the idea that prehistoric actions were guided primarily by practicality and expedience. Rubbish disposal, a superficially mundane activity, provides a critical case for exploring the depth to which cultural logics penetrate. Ethnoarchaeological research on discard behaviour in Mesoamerican houselots has modelled rubbish disposal as a matter of expedience predictable by factors such as density of settlement and length of occupation. At the Classic period site of Chunchucmil, Yucatan, such models based on practical reason succeed only partly in predicting the distribution of rubbish. Ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of rubbish in Mesoamerica suggest that fully understanding its distribution requires attention to cultural logics. At Chunchucmil, ancient Maya cosmology explains the location of dumps within households. Thus, both practical and cultural logics structured discard. The case of Maya subsistence farming suggests that practical logic is subsumed by cultural logic, rather than the two logics conflicting. These findings show how broadly-held beliefs and predispositions are instantiated and reproduced in daily life.

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 importance of chronology is reasserted as a means to achieving history and a sense of temporality. A range of current methods for estimating the dates and durations of archaeological processes and events are considered, including visual inspection of graphs and tables of calibrated dates and the summing of the probability distributions of calibrated dates. These approaches are found wanting. The Bayesian statistical framework is introduced, and a worked example presents simulated radiocarbon dates as a demonstration of the explicit, quantified, probabilistic estimates now possible on a routine basis. Using this example, the reliability of the chronologies presented for the five long barrows considered in this series of papers is explored. It is essential that the ‘informative’ prior beliefs in a chronological model are correct. If they are not, the dating suggested by the model will be incorrect. In contrast, the ‘uninformative’ prior beliefs have to be grossly incorrect before the outputs of the model are importantly wrong. It is also vital that the radiocarbon ages included in a model are accurate, and that their errors are correctly estimated. If they are not, the dating suggested by a model may also be importantly wrong. Strenuous effort and rigorous attention to archaeological and scientific detail are inescapable if reliable chronologies are to be built. The dates presented in the following papers are based on models. ‘All models are wrong, some models are useful’ (Box 1979, 202). We hope readers will find them useful, and will employ ‘worry selectivity’ to determine whether and how each model may be importantly wrong. The questions demand the timetable, and our prehistories deserve both.

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.

Is archaeology a science? Is archaeology a humanity? What are the politics of spectatorship and archaeological representation? These initial thoughts form the basis for our archaeological explorations. Within current archaeological discourse, there are a growing number of requests for expressions, which illuminate and expose the interpretive and artistic qualities of presentation and narration. Yet few scholars actively utilize expressive practice to explore these philosophical issues. As such, we feel that it is an opportune time to intervene in visual and textual discourse by issuing a manifesto for our project. We call for a development of a critically reflexive practice of visual archaeological expressionism, which seeks to contest traditional modes of thought and action.

This article develops recent interpretations of mortuary practices as contexts for producing social memory and personhood to argue that early medieval cairns and mounds served to commemorate concepts of gender and genealogy. Commemorative strategies are identified in the composite character, shape and location of cairns and in their relationship with other commemorative monuments, namely Class I symbol-stones. The argument is developed through a consideration of the excavations of early medieval cists and cairns at Lundin Links in Fife.

Forty-four radiocarbon results are now available from the Ascott-under-Wychwood long barrow, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Three alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. In our preferred model, pre-barrow occupation including small timber structures and a midden was followed by a gap long enough to allow a turfline to form. Cists and the primary barrow were then initiated and the first human remains inserted into the cists; there was subsequently a secondary extension to the barrow. In the Bayesian model for this interpretation, occupation goes back to the fortieth century cal. bc, the midden being quite short-lived in the latter part of the fortieth or first part of the thirty-ninth century cal. bc. The gap was very probably not less than 50 years long, in the latter part of the thirty-ninth century cal. bc and the first half of the thirty-eighth century cal. bc. The barrow was begun between 3760–3695 cal. bc and extended in 3745–3670 cal. bc, probably within a generation. The first bodies were inserted in 3755–3690 cal. bc, contemporaneously with the primary barrow, and the last remains were probably deposited in the 3640s or 3630s cal. bc. The use of the monument probably did not exceed three to five generations. In an alternative interpretation of the sequence, greater continuity is seen between the underlying timber structures and midden on the one hand and the cists on the other, which could have preceded the initiation of the barrow itself. The Bayesian model for this interpretation suggests the gap between occupation and barrow was much shorter, probably of only 1–40 years' duration. It gives slightly different other estimates for the sequence but agrees with the main model in suggesting an overall short span of use for the whole monument. In a third interpretation, some of the human remains are interpreted as older than the cists and barrow. The Bayesian model for this again gives slightly different estimates but suggests that such putatively ancestral remains would not have been more than a decade or two older than the initiation of cists and barrow. Results are briefly discussed in relation to the overall sequence from occupation and midden to monument, the brevity of monument use, and issues of remembrance.

In preparing for the publication of the seven papers in the special supplement of Cambridge Archaeological Journal, we were concerned to find an outlet that could find a worldwide audience, as we believe that these papers have more than regional or period significance. That is a big claim. The case studies presented in the supplement are all of early Neolithic long barrows and long cairns of the fourth millennium cal. bc in southern England. Why should a study of the dating of constructions that held the remains of selected human dead, from a particular region of northwest Europe, at a particular point in the regional Neolithic sequence, have any wider importance? We offer two reasons. First, we are applying, perhaps for the first time to a group of monuments rather than to individual sites, a method for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates which enables much more precise estimates of chronology. Secondly, from this promise of far more robust and precise dating come many implications for the kinds of agents that we may wish to people our pasts, for the kinds of lives they lived, and for the histories that we can try to write about them. These are two developments, we suggest, which any archaeology needs to embrace.

Food items are not only food ‘for the body’, they are also ‘food for thought’ about our relations to ‘others’ in the world of living people, and to cosmological forces. Ethnographic studies and historical documents show a striking difference between Africa and the Near East with regard to symbolic elaborations of food-related items. This difference is grounded in a contrast between a cooking pot theme in Africa and a baking oven theme in the Near East. It is manifested in differences in the emergence of two fundamental cultural features generally assumed to be linked elements of the Neolithic, namely domestication of cereals and invention of pottery. In the Near East, the material shows that domesticated cereals appeared about 2000 years earlier than ceramics, while in Africa the evidence indicates that pottery appeared around 2000 years earlier than cultivated cereals. This article explores different social and symbolic correlates of the different sequences of Neolithic innovations in the Near East and Africa.

Outcrops of metallic mineralization were potentially prominent locations in past landscapes, the characteristics of their constituent minerals granting them distinctive appearances and properties. To date, most treatments have cast humans as exploiters whose prime motivation for engagement with the mineral world was the acquisition of metals. This article examines new evidence for Early Bronze Age activity at Roman Lode, a predominantly iron-rich ore deposit on Exmoor in southwest Britain. In addition to assessing whether this represents metal exploitation, other interpretive avenues are explored including the potential role of the site as a provider of other resources such as pigments and quartz and as an element in a wider conceptual and physical landscape. A layered approach to the interpretation of such sites is advocated. Only by combining a cognitive interpretation with materialist perspectives will we arrive at a more insightful understanding of the past significance of minerals, mining and landscape.

Forty-four radiocarbon results are now available from the Hazleton North long cairn, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Three alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. In our preferred model the cairn is considered to be a unitary construction, following on from the pre-cairn midden and other activity after a short interval during which the site was cultivated; bodies of the recently dead were subsequently interred in the chambered areas. Further human remains were deposited in the entrances to the chambers slightly later in the Neolithic, after the primary phase of use of the cairn for burials. This model suggests that the cairn was constructed in the first half of the thirty-seventh century cal. bc, and that its primary use for burial lasted for only two or three generations, ending probably in the 3620s cal. bc. A second model which varies only in postulating continuity between the pre-cairn activity and the cairn itself has poor overall agreement, suggesting that this interpretation is improbable. The third model explores the possibility that some of the human remains (those where the deposition of intact corpses cannot be strongly inferred from the archaeological record) may have been curated for a considerable time since death when deposited in the tomb. This interpretation suggests a slightly later date for the construction of the cairn, in the middle decades of the thirty-seventh century cal. bc, and suggests that any human remains which were not interred as corpses were less than a century old when deposited. The correspondence between the bones most likely, on chronological grounds, to be ‘ancestral’ and those most likely, on archaeological grounds, not to have been deposited as intact corpses is, however, poor. For this reason we feel there is no clear evidence that the human remains at Hazleton were not deposited shortly after the deaths of the individuals concerned, and we prefer model 1.

Decorated clay stamps carrying a culturally filtered range of abstract designs are one of the most visually striking but problematic categories of portable art found at Neolithic and Copper Age sites in western Asia and southern Europe. This article proposes a revised account of their production, consumption and changing values across space and time, by emphasizing their biographies, human relations and cultural embeddedness. They were sometimes worn as amulets, but primarily designed to be hand-held printing and impressing tools, used to reproduce copies of powerful graphic images on the surface of other cultural materials. It is argued that their potent signatures repeatedly attached, revealed and reproduced significant cultural concepts and relations across different people and practices and across the material and supernatural worlds.

The interpretation of images in relation to their particular setting on rock surfaces has been highlighted in recent studies into the location of depictions in the natural landscape and shamanistic beliefs and practices. The significance of the approach in this article, however, lies in studying the morphology of the rock surface as an integral part of the visual imagery of the rock art, notably how the physical dimensions of the rock surface were used in recreating the physical landscape familiar to the prehistoric artists. We use experiential and cognitive approaches to visual perception to combine an appreciation of artistic endeavour of rock art with an enhanced understanding of the human capacity for creating such images. The results of this approach to rock art contribute to a better understanding of the creative and cognitive aspects of prehistoric fisher-gatherer-hunter art. A detailed example is discussed showing how the physical landscape was re-created in the morphology of the rock surface by using the motion of skiing to illustrate one of the visual narratives at the site of Zalavruga in northern Russia.

Twenty-seven radiocarbon results are now available from the Fussell's Lodge long barrow, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Three alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. It is hard to decide between these, though we prefer the third. In the first (following the excavator), the construction is a unitary one, and the human remains included are by definition already old. In the second, the primary mortuary structure is seen as having two phases, and is set within a timber enclosure; these are later closed by the construction of a long barrow. In that model of the sequence, deposition began in the thirty-eighth century cal. bc and the mortuary structure was extended probably in the 3660s–3650s cal. bc; the long barrow was probably built in the 3630s–3620s cal. bc; ancestral remains are not in question; and the use of the primary structure may have lasted for a century or so. In the third, preferred model, a variant of the second, we envisage the inclusion of some ancestral remains in the primary mortuary structure alongside fresh remains. This provides different estimates of the date of initial construction (probably in the last quarter of the thirty-eighth century cal. bc or the first half of the thirty-seventh century cal. bc) and the duration of primary use, but agrees in setting the date of the long barrow probably in the 3630s–3620s cal. bc. These results are discussed in relation to the development and meanings of long barrows at both national and local scales.

This article presents a study of the deposition of jewellery on bodies in the third-millennium bc Mesopotamian ‘Royal Cemetery’ at Ur. Four assemblages of adornments are identified and evaluated in relation to burial type, gender, age, privilege, and behavioural role. Aspects of the social and ritual identities of the dead are then interpreted through adornment. While the historic definition of the interred community and the precise nature of their practices are open to speculation, this study begins to clarify dynamics of group and individual identity at this site of human sacrifice.

Thirty-one radiocarbon results are now available from the West Kennet long barrow, and are presented within an interpretive Bayesian statistical framework. Two alternative archaeological interpretations of the sequence are given, each with a separate Bayesian model. In our preferred interpretation, the barrow is seen as a unitary construction (given the lack of dating samples from the old ground surface, ditches or constructional features themselves), with a series of deposits of human remains made in the chambers following construction. Primary deposition in the chambers is followed by further secondary deposition of some human remains, including children, and layers of earth and chalk, the latest identifiable finds in which are Beaker sherds. In the Bayesian model for this sequence, the construction of the monument at West Kennet, as dated from the primary mortuary deposits, occurred in 3670–3635 cal. bc, probably in the middle decades of the thirty-seventh century cal. bc. The last interments of this initial use of the chambers probably occurred in 3640–3610 cal. bc. The difference between these two distributions suggests that this primary mortuary activity probably continued for only 10–30 years. After a hiatus probably lasting for rather more than a century, the infilling of the chambers began in 3620–3240 cal. bc and continued into the second half of the third millennium cal. bc. In an alternative interpretation, we do not assume that all the people dated from the primary mortuary deposits were placed in the monument in a fleshed or partially articulated condition; they could therefore have died before the monument was built, although they must have died before the end of the formation of the mortuary deposit. In the Bayesian model for this interpretation, the monument appears to belong either to the thirty-seventh century cal. bc or the mid-thirty-sixth century cal. bc, and deposition again appears short-lived, but the model is unstable. Results are discussed in relation to the setting and sequence of the local region.

Campfire rituals of focused attention created Baldwinian selection for enhanced working memory among our Homo sapiens ancestors. This model is grounded in five propositions: the emergence of symbolism occurred late in the archaeological record; this emergence was caused by a fortuitous genetic mutation that enhanced working memory capacity; a Baldwinian process where genetic adaptation follows somatic adaptation was the mechanism for this emergence; meditation directly affects brain areas critical to attention and working memory; and shamanistic healing rituals were fitness-enhancing in our ancestral past. Each proposition is discussed and defended. Supporting evidence and potential future tests are presented.

It is now 25 years since Symbolic and Structural Archaeology (henceforth SSA) was first published in 1982. Why run a review feature upon a book this old? Clearly not to let readers know about its now-familiar contents. One justification is historical. Very few works have had such an effect — in archaeology, the nearest parallel comes with works such as Binford and Binford's New Perspectives in Archaeology in 1968, which laid the basis for an entire agenda of New Archaeology. Like Binford and Binford's book, SSA marked a transformation of archaeology as much as, or more than, it actually transformed the field itself. It signalled the coming of age of a coherent cohort of young, energetic scholars with a strongly defined new agenda. It breached taken-for-granted limits with bold, even flagrant ambition; it consciously invoked new intellectual frames. As much as any particular publishing event can punctuate the scholarly process with the intimation of a new direction, the publication of SSA did so.

And yet, a review feature on the book would perhaps not be entirely justified as purely a historical retrospective. It is clear from the trajectory of theoretical publication in Britain (and to some extent America) over the last decades, from the content of archaeological theory courses in universities, and the vocabulary bounced around at conferences such as TAG and the SAAs, that the agenda of SSA — often termed ‘post-processualism’ — has become the dominant voice in mainstream archaeological theory. The challenger has become the establishment; the once-unthinkable has become normal science. There are many other theoretical voices, of course, but even self-proclaimed alternative movements show signs of having absorbed, osmotically, much of the theoretical agenda set by post-processualism, even if their answers differ.

Twenty-five is a human generation, and perhaps the closest approach to eternity in the rapidly fermenting world of theory; the current generation of students (future colleagues, really) will have known no other paradigm. Hence, we have asked our contributors not only to comment retrospectively upon the book itself, but also prospectively, on how well its agenda has weathered the years, on what roads remain untaken, and upon where they think the future might lie.

Like archaeologists, linguists and geneticists too use the data and methods of their disciplines to open up their own windows onto our past. These disparate visions of human prehistory cry out to be reconciled into a coherent holistic scenario, yet progress has long been frustrated by interdisciplinary disputes and misunderstandings (not least about Indo-European). In this article, a comparative-historical linguist sets out, to his intended audience of archaeologists, the core principles and methods of his discipline that are of relevance to theirs. They are first exemplified for the better-known languages of Europe, before being put into practice in a lesser-known case-study. This turns to the New World, setting its greatest indigenous ‘Empire’, that of the Incas, alongside its greatest surviving language family today, Quechua. Most Andean archaeologists assume a straightforward association between these two. The linguistic evidence, however, exposes this as nothing but a popular myth, and writes instead a wholly new script for the prehistory of the Andes — which now awaits an archaeological story to match.