This paper focuses upon the web of practices and transformations bound up in the extraction and movement of megaliths during the Neolithic of southern Britain. The focus is on the Avebury landscape of Wiltshire, where over 700 individual megaliths were employed in the construction of ceremonial and funerary monuments. Locally sourced, little consideration has been given to the process of acquisition and movement of sarsen stones that make up key monuments such as the Avebury henge and its avenues, attention instead focusing on the middle-distance transportation of sarsen out of this region to Stonehenge. Though stone movements were local, we argue they were far from lacking in significance, as indicated by the subsequent monumentalization of at least two locations from which they were likely acquired. We argue that since such stones embodied place(s), their removal, movement and resetting represented a remarkably dynamic and potentially disruptive reconfiguration of the world as it was known. Megaliths were never inert or stable matter, and we need to embrace this in our interpretative accounts if we are to understand the very different types of monument that emerged in prehistory as a result.

It is proposed that our understanding of medieval town foundation is limited by a failure to appreciate that ‘town’ is a relational category. It is argued that urban character emerges from social relations, with some sets of social relationship revealing urbanity and others not, as places develop along distinctive, but related, trajectories. This argument is developed through the application of assemblage theory to the development of towns in thirteenth-century southern England. The outcome is a proposal that, by focusing on the social relations through which towns are revealed as a distinctive category of place, we can better comprehend why and how towns mattered in medieval society and develop a greater understanding of the relationship of urbanization to other social processes such as commercialization and associated changes in the countryside.

The large-scale accumulation of goods is a widely recognized, but little studied, feature of early urbanization in Mesopotamia. Current research links the mobilization of goods in early cities to the expansion of cross-regional trade routes. A related aspect of urban growth is the virtual disappearance of intramural burials from the archaeological record. This contrasts with earlier phases where burials were incorporated into the routines of domestic life. Adapting Max Weber's insights regarding the origins of modern capitalist accumulation in changing forms of religious practice, this paper will trace the changing moral context of economic behaviour by examining long-term patterns of burial in the transition from village to urban life. The momentous social changes that accompanied the urban revolution transformed relationships between the living, the dead and the world of goods. Trajectories of accumulation reinforced by the provisioning of the deceased were reversed at the onset of urbanization, as the dead were expelled from the context of the living. The flow of commodities was now regulated by emerging forms of religious institution that fostered a culture of capital accumulation in rapidly developing urban centres.

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.

Traditional accounts of animals in Mesolithic Northwest Europe have ultimately been economic in character, with a particular focus of the larger ungulate species that formed the dietary mainstay. Smaller mammalian species, regularly grouped as ‘fur-bearing’ species, also play a role in such accounts, as the source of important non-nutritional materials, namely their fur. However, how has placing these species in this broad category impacted archaeology's interpretation of their remains in the Mesolithic? This paper argues economic categorization of these species has led to an automatic interpretation of their remains, which may overlook evidence for other uses and treatments. This research proposes that the remains of ‘fur-bearing’ species were not just waste products from fur extraction, but were also wrapped up in complex and meaningful human-nonhuman relationships, which impacted how these remains were treated, and ultimately shaped the archaeological record.

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 article revisits one of the key heuristic devices archaeologists have used to appreciate personhood over the last 15 years—the idea that there is a tension between individual and dividual aspects of personhood. I argue that personhood is always relational, but in varied ways, and propose a revised heuristic approach to assist with appreciating diversity in the multi-dimensional and multi-modal character of personhood.

Present in the Trans-Pecos rock art of west Texas are many motifs intelligible within hunter-gatherer ontological frameworks. These motifs—including human figures missing heads and limbs, figures with disproportionately large eyes, polymelia and pilo-erection—are concerned with somatic transformations and distortions experienced in altered states of consciousness. Ethnographic analogies also demonstrate that other Trans-Pecos features—smearing, rubbing and chipping of pigment and incorporation of natural inequalities of the rock surfaces into images—are evidence of kinetic experiences or embodied processes, including the important interaction with the ‘veil’ that separates one tier of the cosmos from others. By exploring the related concepts of embodiment, somatic transformation and process within non-Western ontologies, I offer a unified but multi-component explanation for the meanings and motivations behind several Trans-Pecos rock-art motifs. I also address the consumption of rock art in west Texas—how it was viewed and used by the original artists and subsequent viewers to shape, maintain and challenge ideologies and identities.

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 ethnographic decipherment of the Bushman (San) rock art of southern Africa instigated a revolution in our understanding of hunter-gatherer rock arts worldwide, even in regions widely separated from the original context of the model. Crucial to this decipherment were the narratives of the Bushman Qing, an inhabitant of the nineteenth-century Maloti-Drakensberg. This article returns to Qing's testimony to investigate why it is that a putative ‘hunter-gatherer’ of the Maloti-Drakensberg should have chosen to express the relationship between ritual specialists (‘shamans’) and non-human entities (game animals and the rain) through taming idioms. It discusses the wider context of ‘taming’ and ‘wildness’ in Southern Bushman thought, responding to calls to consider these communities and their visual arts in light of the perspectives of the ‘new animisms’. It explores how these idioms help us to understand particular visual tropes in the rock art of the Maloti-Drakensberg and highlights the integrated nature of ‘ritual’ and hunting specialists in Southern Bushman life.

This study approaches the material world of the Neo-Assyrian period in Mesopotamia from the theoretical and methodological standpoint of the field of sensory archaeology. Analysis of relevant royal inscriptions, administrative tablets, bas-reliefs and artefacts excavated from the palaces in the Assyrian capital cities of Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh demonstrates that the Assyrian kings and their courtly advisors participated in activities of biopolitics. The study identifies several phenomena and features of the Assyrian world, including palaces that served as sensorial envelopes, commensal feasts, travelling processions, water-control projects and libation rituals that the Neo-Assyrian royal authority deployed in attempts to control sensory experiences. At the same time, the study reconstructs the sensory experiences of Assyrian bodies as they passed through royally curated structures and landscapes.

This paper focuses on ideas of body construction in the Phoenician-Punic western Mediterranean. I concentrate on the study of ‘bottle-shaped’ terracottas and examine their connections with anthropomorphized and zoomorphic jugs and the bottle-shaped idol, a symbol engraved on the stelae of tophets. Exploring the Phoenician-Punic isomorphism between jugs, figurines and bodies introduces us to the study of the creation of a specific body world in terms of fluids: a world in which bodies were perceived as containers of liquids. I argue that this way of defining bodies is materialized in the figurines in two ways: first, via the transformation of the body into a bottle-shaped form, and second, via the emphasis on representing mouths, noses, breasts or genitalia, all parts of the body through which fluids circulate. I also examine the social and ritual contexts of the figurines and discuss issues of personhood and relational identities.

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.

This article supplements current dialogue on the archaeology of slavery, offering an Indian Ocean counterpoint to a topic that has largely focused on the Atlantic world. It also delves into the essentially uncharted domain of the archaeology of indentured labour. New plural societies, characterized by cultural hybridity, were created around the world as a consequence of labour diasporas in the late historic period. What do these societies look like during the process of nation building and after independence? Can we study this development through archaeology? Focusing on Mauritius, this paper discusses the complexities of the island, and how it can be representative of similar newly formed plural societies in the Indian Ocean. During French and British imperial rule, the island served as an important trading post for a range of European imperial powers. These varied groups initiated the movement and settlement of African, Indian and Chinese transplanted communities. By exploring the dynamic nature of inter-group interaction on Mauritius, this paper emphasizes the nuanced nature of how different peoples arrived and made the island their home. Mauritius played a vital role in the transportation of forced and free labour, both within and beyond this oceanic world, and offers an important viewpoint from which to survey the ways in which historical archaeology can improve our understanding of the broader archaeo-historical processes of which these diasporas were an integral feature. The paper focuses on the outcomes of settlement, as viewed through the complex practices that underpin local food culture, the use and development of language and the way materials are employed for the expression of identity. The article also traces the roots of contemporary cultural retention for indentured labourers to administrative decisions made by the British, and ultimately explores how heritage and language can provide a powerful lens on mechanisms of cultural expression. In addition to illustrating the nuanced and multifaceted nature of group interaction on Mauritius itself, this article raises an issue of broader relevance—the need for historical archaeologists to give greater consideration to the Indian Ocean, rather than focusing on the Atlantic world. This would allow us to achieve a more informed understanding of European slave trading and associated systems of labour migration within a more global framework.

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.

Sardinian Neolithic rock-cut tombs are not merely underground repositories, but complex and dynamic ritual architectures whose sequence of chambers was designed to host elaborate programmes of death ritual. The internal walls of about 250 of these tombs are decorated with carvings and paintings depicting architectural structures, cattle-head motifs and geometric designs. Research has often focused on classifying the motifs into typo-chronological categories, and little attention has been paid to their architectural setting and how art actually interacts with the spaces and structures of the tombs. How were art and architecture combined to create a setting appropriate for deathways? The present article results from a systematic review of this art and discusses patterns in the distribution and position of the motifs inside the tombs. Motifs were repeatedly placed at a few specific locations, suggesting that they played an active role in standardized ritual uses of the tombs. It is argued that art significantly contributed to structure spaces, sequence rituals, shape the ceremonial experience of the tombs, and was therefore a key agent in Late Neolithic deathways.

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.

The work of time-making is always a work of the present, and even in its driest form, the archaeological chronology, is a political process. Archaeological practices which make time from space necessarily dissect unified material landscapes into temporal slices, ‘cuts’ of time and space that can either mute or give voice to past interactions with material landscapes, engagements sometimes called ‘the past in the past.’ Despite the fact that historical and archaeological remains in India are often central to political contestation, the structures and objects studied by archaeologists and art historians are typically viewed as straightforward exemplars of past periods, dynasties, or cultures, disappearing from gaze as they leave the period to which they ‘belong’. This article considers some forms of interaction between people and places in southern India—from ashmounds to megaliths to temples—interactions ‘out of time’ according to traditional archaeological practice, but which reveal past contestations and concerns. Such forms of landscape history require both analytical techniques such as chronologies which divide time, as well as landscape-based approaches which can heal those divisions by allowing past action ‘out of place’ to be made visible.

The multiscalar analysis of pottery traditions in south central Africa opens a new perspective on the study of ancient polities. Focusing on an area of central Africa known for the existence of great kingdoms, I show how past political entities have left lingering traces in the cultural landscape and, more specifically, in the pottery traditions. As ceramics are one of the major tools in the archaeological arsenal, the way they can be related to political structures is of interest to archaeologists around the world. Analysing the chaîne opératoire of living pottery traditions, at an individual and regional level, I characterize the geographic extent of a series of technical behaviours. These technical domains fit with other aspects of society such as languages or matrimonial strategies, but also with economic and political aspects such as salt making and distribution networks and past political entities. They are the materialization of resilient social spaces created by ancient political entities.

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.