The contrast between monumentalized burials and almost invisible settlements has dominated Neolithic studies in western Europe, reinforcing an artificial divide between ceremonial and economically productive landscapes. By combining a material culture approach with a landscape scale, comparative artefact studies can trace connections between people, places, and social contexts. This paper investigates social networks in Late Neolithic Portugal by examining artefact provenance, biographies, and deposition on the Mondego Plateau. It focuses on three sites and four object categories characteristic of this period. The study reveals great diversity of raw materials, circulation of everyday objects, and regional availability of resources previously thought to be imports. It suggests that people used dispersed resource areas in an integrated way, and that exchange was an integral part of routine life. Evidence for links across the region is not restricted to tombs. Burial assemblages resulted from a complex web of social relations that preceded, accompanied, and followed the actions surrounding death. Understanding these places and fundamental questions about Neolithic social production and reproduction requires reconnecting tombs and settlements into wider lived landscapes.

A pair of animal heads of the Faardal type is central in our reinterpretation of the Late Bronze Age Vestby hoard from eastern Norway. After a period of use and circulation, the heads were mounted on bodies belonging to a different animal species. We argue that the making of the animal figurines and the other high-quality objects of the hoard can only be properly understood against the backdrop of Scandinavian Bronze Age cosmology. This line of thought extends to the presence of a tin bead necklace, which we interpret as a lunar calendar. By combining a ‘body perspective’ – including understandings of body techniques, operational sequences and the ‘sociality’ of objects – with a ‘symbolist perspective’ – including symbol systems, cosmology and intentionality – we put the head back onto the body, so to speak. We also scrutinize the premises for earlier interpretations of the objects' ‘life stories’ and reinterpret their trajectories. This influences the understanding of the act of hoarding, and finally leads to a discussion of how hoarding was also somehow related to the ‘birth’ of the artefacts.