Collective tombs are a characteristic feature of Neolithic societies of Western Europe. Some recent studies have suggested that they originated from an earlier tradition of individual burials at the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. The concept of collective burial involving movement and manipulation of bodies and body parts is, however, entirely different. The former tries to preserve the integrity of the bodies and does not acknowledge the stages of metamorphosis of the corpse. The latter by contrast involves observation and assistance in the dissolution of the body. Recent discoveries of Early Mesolithic collective tombs in southern Belgium have underlined the fact that collective burials are far from restricted to Neolithic contexts in Western Europe. They themselves, however, are not merely a potential point of origin for Middle and Late Neolithic collective tombs but form part of a long-standing tradition reaching back into the Upper Palaeolithic.

This article investigates the degree and nature of ‘imposed form’ in Middle Palaeolithic scrapers, the most common category of stone tool produced by Neanderthals. Novice flintknappers unfamiliar with Middle Palaeolithic tool forms were found to consistently employ two rules in manufacturing scrapers: the striking platform and any adjacent blunt edges were left intact to facilitate prehension, and the longest edge with the most acute spine-plane angle was retouched. Scrapers from three major Middle Palaeolithic sites adhered to these rules in over 90 per cent of cases, but significant divergence from these rules was found in a sample from Skhul cave (Israel) level B1, associated with early anatomically modern Homo sapiens. It is concluded that Middle Palaeolithic scraper manufacture was structured by the need to create a suitable working edge, and to locate that edge to maximize ease and comfort during manufacture and use. The overall shape of the resulting tools was thus not an expression of ‘imposed form’ in the conventional sense. The discovery of violations of these rules in the Skhul B1 collection provides evidence of increased use of imposed form, as well as potentially significant behavioural differences between early anatomically modern Homo sapiens and contemporary Neanderthals.

Monumental sanctuaries in Central Italy, more specifically South Etruria, appear suddenly in the middle of the first millennium bc. Ancient Greek and Roman authors wrote about the Etruscans, and the Etruscans themselves produced a mass of material evidence which they buried in their tombs, and which drew on Classical elements including mythology. As a result of the wealth and breadth of archaeological material, this society provides much, so far unexplored, scope for cognitive investigation. Here my concern is why sanctuaries emerged in the late sixth century, and why the highly codified temple architecture of South Etruria took the form that it did.

Storage of symbolic information outside the human brain is accepted here as the first undisputed evidence for cultural modernity. In the hunter-gatherer context of the Stone Age this storage could include artwork, rapidly changing artefact styles and organized spatial layout of campsites. Modern human behaviour in this context is distinguished by a symbolic use of space and material culture to define social relationships, including significant groupings based on attributes such as kinship, gender, age or skill. Symbolism maintains, negotiates, legitimizes and transmits such relationships. It is argued here that artefacts are not inherently imbued with symbolism and that modern human culture cannot be automatically inferred from inventories of archaeologically recovered material culture. Evidence for the out-of-brain storage of symbolism in southern African sites first appears in the final phase of the Middle Stone Age at about 40,000 years ago.

Normative discontinuity is little studied by archaeologists although its importance for understanding diachronic phenomena like social stratification is obvious. Cognitive research provides the ground for a Weberian theory of normative change as the outcome of contestations between competing social myths. These conflicts arise from incongruities between metaphorically-structured conceptualizations of social reality and experienced social reality. To facilitate the archaeological inference of normative change, a typology of generative rules is suggested by which normative concepts might be expressed as substantive metaphors. The methodology is applied to a pilot study of temporal covariation in pottery design imagery within three major ceramic traditions of late Nuragic Sardinia. When ‘read’ as substantive metaphorical expressions of past social experiences, late Nuragic ceramic imagery suggests a coherent set of normative concepts ‘structured’ in terms of a central ontological metaphor of the general ‘vessel-as-social-landscape’ type. Moreover, variations in that material imagery make sense in terms of normative changes conducive to the emergence of class relations.

A recently discovered painted pottery vessel from the Predynastic cemetery of Umm el-Qaab in Abydos, Egypt (early fourth millennium bc), bears one of the most sophisticated proto-historic scenes surviving from the ancient Near East. The excavators interpreted the scene as a depiction of warfare. A systematic analysis of its various components, however, as well as two similar contemporary scenes, suggests that the scene depicts dancing. It is even possible that the scene represents four stages in a sequence of movement. If so, it is one of the earliest movement notation documents preserved from antiquity.

A core question of cognitive archaeology is the evolution of modern thinking. In this article, it is argued that a cluster of specific cognitive abilities, ‘executive functions’, was one of the key evolutionary acquisitions that led to the development of modern thinking. A review of the history of executive functions is presented as well as current opinions as to their nature and genetic basis. Examples are also presented from the cognitive archaeological record that may be representative of executive functions in the evolution of modern thought.