The iconic Dupljaja chariot model from the Carpathian Basin informs us on cosmologies and technologies of Bronze Age societies in Europe between 1600 and 1200 BC. It communicates key elements of religious imagery and ritual practice alongside technical features of working chariots. Through a detailed reappraisal employing use-wear, compositional, and iconographic analyses as well as 3D modelling of the chariot model, the authors explore the social context of its creation and use. Integrating functional wheels with four spokes and iconographic depictions of the similar cross-in-circle symbol, the Dupljaja chariot combines and cross-references motifs with pan-European relevance in the Bronze Age. The study aims to better understand the interplay between the local and regional context of the Dupljaja chariot and how its distinct features arose from the material and ideological networks defining later Bronze Age Europe.

An integrated study of the zooarchaeological, iconographic, and artefactual data from the Etruscan site of Poggio Civitate (Murlo, Italy), inhabited from the eighth to the sixth century bc, reveals intra-site differences in the distribution and disposal of animal body parts and species represented, including wild animals. Smaller mammals and birds that would be trapped are encountered more frequently in the site's workshop area and larger prey (deer, wolf, bear, and aurochs) that would be hunted are found more often in the area of the elite residence. We suggest that some of these remains are evidence that hunting was for the purpose of trophy display by the elites of Poggio Civitate and we discuss the social implications of such an activity in this community.

The role played by ritual in the field of human rights has not been widely remarked or analysed. Here I argue that the triumph of human rights as the predominant language for making social justice claims in the international sphere is partly attributable to the power of certain linguistic and embodied rituals. I suggest that these rituals veil the material factors at stake when human rights are invoked internationally, obscuring the relationship between neoliberalism, material inequality, and human rights. I compare the vision of justice propounded through the rituals of human rights with that proposed by the peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina. Vía Campesina’s vision is grounded in material realities and confronts neoliberal policies head on. I consider how it unsettles the rituals of human rights, and whether it can be preserved in the form of a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants.

This paper discusses the deposition of weapons in English rivers and wetlands during the Viking Age. Such finds have been extensively studied in Scandinavia but have rarely been academically discussed in Britain. It can be argued that the arrival of the Scandinavians in ninth- to eleventh-century Britain precipitated a marked increase in depositions of a ‘pagan’ nature. Despite deep-rooted, institutionalized Christianity having dominated England for some time, it is possible that pagan beliefs were dormant but not forgotten, with the Scandinavian arrival triggering their resurgence. Weapons form a large number of ritual depositions, with seventy deposits being mapped geographically to identify distributional patterns across the landscape. It is suggested here that ‘liminal' depositions in Viking Age Scandinavia provide an interpretative model for these finds. Given the context of endemic conflict and territorial consolidation within which they may have been deposited in England, this material can shed new light on attitudes to landscapes subject to conflict and consolidation.

The aim of this paper is to investigate body-related beliefs and practices in relation to society in Middle Bronze Age Transylvania (central Romania between c. 1900 and 1450 BC), known as the area of the Wietenberg Culture. The low number of human remains and their treatment (through cremation and fragmentation of inhumed bodies) has been interpreted by some authors as a willingness to do away with the physical body. In contrast to this opinion, I try here to show that quite the opposite was the case. The body not only stood at the centre of a variety of rituals (funerary and otherwise), but it also constituted a powerful means for maintaining social order, providing people with an understanding of their place in the world, as well as renegotiating positions and meanings.

Ever since Durkheim, the relationship between ritual and sociability has been a primary theme of theoretical reflection in sociology. The article highlights a number of aspects relating to that theme and explores the question of whether ritual change – posited by the author as an historical evidence – can be adequately understood in this way, notably in terms of its societal implications. In the second half, the author presents a detailed analysis of a number of issues that emerge when ritualisation is considered as a continuous historical process. The prerequisites and mechanisms of ritualisation are at the core of this reflection, in particular in exploring how routine action, ritual experience and symbolic auto-declaration can be deployed in the context of the creation of social ties.

This article attempts an interpretation of an unusual assemblage of cattle skulls recovered from recent excavations at the Viking Age monumental hall of Hofstaðir in Iceland. Osteological analysis of the skulls indicates ritual decapitation and display of cattle heads, and this article seeks to explore the meanings of this practice in relation to the context of the site and the wider historical and ethnographic literature. It is argued that the beheading of cattle and display of their heads was a part of sacrificial acts conducted on a seasonal basis at the site, and primarily in the context of feasting and socio-political gatherings. The gatherings acted simultaneously as a means of both dissipating social tension and enhancing political status.