A wall relief, comprising five figures carved on a bench in a communal building dating to the ninth millennium BC, was found in south-eastern Turkey in 2021. It constitutes the earliest known depiction of a narrative ‘scene’, and reflects the complex relationship between humans, the natural world and the animal life that surrounded them during the transition to a sedentary lifestyle.

The interior of Neolithic tombs in Europe is frequently decorated with carved and painted motifs. In Sardinia (Italy), 116 rock-cut tombs have their walls covered with bucrania (schematic depictions of cattle head and horns), which have long been interpreted as representations of a bull-like divinity. This article reviews similar examples of bucranium ‘art’ in the tombs of three traditional societies in South-East Asia, focusing on the agency of the motifs and their roles within social relationships between the living, the dead, and the spiritual world. From these ethnographic examples and the archaeological evidence in Sardinia, it is suggested that bucrania in Neolithic tombs were a specialized form of material culture that had multiple, cumulative effects and functions associated with social display, memory, reproduction, death, and protection.

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.