Recent investigations at the Maya centre of Nakum (in Guatemala) enabled the study of the evolution of an interesting complex of buildings that started as the so-called E-Group, built during the Preclassic period (c. 600–300 bc ). It was used for solar observations and rituals commemorating agricultural and calendrical cycles. During the Classic period (ad 250–800), the major building of the complex (Structure X) was converted into a large pyramidal temple where several burials, including at least one royal tomb, were placed. We were also able to document evidence of mortuary cults conducted by the Maya in the temple building situated above the burials. The architectural conversion documented in Structure X may reflect important religious and social changes: a transformation from the place where the Sun was observed and worshipped to the place where deceased and deified kings were apotheosized as the Sun Deity during the Classic. Thus the Maya transformed Structure X into one of the most sacred loci at Nakum by imbuing it with a complex solar and underworld symbolism and associating it with the cult of deified ancestors.

A distinctive aspect of human behaviour is the ability to think symbolically. However, tracking the origin of this capability is controversial. From a Peircean perspective, to know if something truly is a symbol we need to know the cultural context in which it was created. Rather than initially asking if materials are symbols/symbolic, we offer that it is more salient to ask how they functioned as signs. Specifically we argue that using the Peircean distinction between qualisigns, sinsigns and legisigns provides support for this endeavour. The ‘flickering’ of early symbolic behaviour (the sporadic occurrences of objects with embedded social meanings in the Pleistocene archaeological record) can best be seen as sinsigns, whereas sites that show long-term presence of such materials are demonstrating the presence of legisigns: the codification of ideas. To illustrate this approach, we apply these ideas to three classes of artefacts, demonstrating how this system can address issues of relevance to palaeoanthropologists and archaeologists who often fetishize the symbolic as the one ability that makes us human.

The walls of Structure J at the Zapotec centre of Monte Albán incorporate monuments, probably carved during the Pe ceramic phase (300–100 bc ), bearing distinctively formatted hieroglyphic inscriptions. Alfonso Caso suggested that hieroglyphic compounds on those monuments name regions conquered by Monte Albán. Many scholars accept an elaboration by Joyce Marcus on this proposal—that some of those compounds denote identifiable places outside the Valley of Oaxaca—and see the inscriptions as evidence for the territorial extent of an expansionist, Monte Albán-centred empire in the Late to Terminal Formative periods (300 bc –ad 200). This paper argues that Marcus’ proposed decipherments are implausible because they are structurally inconsistent with one another and with Zapotec scribal conventions for recording toponyms in other inscriptions. The Structure J texts remain undeciphered. Therefore they cannot now serve as evidence for the nature and reach of the Monte Albán polity, and generalizations about state formation that relied on Marcus’ readings need to be reconsidered.

In this article I review arguments in favour of the need and possibility of importing a revitalized concept of art in archaeological reasoning. By comprehending the concept of art as a function, rather than as a property inherent within particular kinds of objects or events, I offer a way of understanding art as the mode in which a phenomenon operates when its ontological multiplicity, its variety of equally real modes of being, becomes exposed. Seen in this vein, art emerges as an entity both created and experienced when several potential versions of a thing or event are laid bare. I emphasize that an element's capacity to communicate such factual intersectionality requires effort in order to endure; and argue that it is the formats for such ‘practices of maintenance’ that constitute art-worlds situated in culture. I also assert that these strategies, like all formalized engagements with material culture, generate traces, and accordingly can be grasped by analyses of an archaeological record. To illustrate this idea, I discuss the red ochre rock paintings from Neolithic northern Sweden made between approximately 6000 and 4000 bp by hunter-gatherer communities that were also producing petroglyphs.

One of the aspects of the relationship between rock art and shamanism, which has been supposed to be of a universal nature, inspired by trance experience, concerns the intentional integration of the images with rock. Rock surface therefore has been interpreted, in numerous shamanic rock-art contexts, as a veil beyond which the otherworld could be encountered. Such an idea was originally proposed in southern Africa, then within Upper Palaeolithic cave art and also other rock-art traditions in diverse parts of the world. This paper for the first time discusses the relevance of this observation from the perspective of unquestionable shamanic culture in Siberia. It shows that the idea of the otherworld to be found on the other side of the rock actually is a widespread motif of shamanic beliefs in Siberia, and that variants of this belief provide a new mode of insight into understanding the semantics of Siberian rock art. Siberian data therefore support previous hypotheses of the shamanic nature of associating rock images with rock surface.

We present the analysis of 29 human-transported limestone pebbles found during recent excavations (2009–11) in the Final Epigravettian levels at the Caverna delle Arene Candide, Italy. All pebbles are oblong, most bear traces of red ochre and many appear intentionally broken. Macroscopic analyses demonstrate morphological similarity with pebbles used as grave goods in the Final Epigravettian necropolis excavated at the site in the 1940s. Mediterranean beaches are the most plausible source for the pebbles, which were carefully selected for their specific shape. Microscopic observation of the pebbles’ surfaces shows traces of ochre located on the edges and/or centres of most pebbles. A breakage experiment suggests that many pebbles were broken with intentional, direct blows to their centre. We propose that these pebbles were used to apply ochre ritually to the individuals buried at the site, and that some were subsequently ritually ‘killed’. This study emphasizes the importance of studying artefacts that are often ignored due to their similarities to simple broken rocks. It also provides a method to study pebbles as a distinct artefact category, and shows that even broken parts should be studied to understand the story told by such objects in the context of prehistoric human social systems.

Fragments of possible fired clay found at Boncuklu Höyük, central Turkey, appear to derive from rudimentary vessels, despite the later ninth- and early eighth-millennium cal. bc and thus ‘Aceramic’ dates for the site. This paper will examine the evidence for such fired clay vessels at Boncuklu and consider their implications as examples of some of the earliest pottery in Anatolia. The discussion will examine contextual evidence for the role of these fragments and consider their relative rarity at the site and the implications for the marked widespread adoption of pottery in southwest Asia c. 7000–6700 cal. bc.

In this paper the notion of assemblage, as derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze, is explored in order to consider change in prehistory. An assemblage-based approach that draws on the concept of ‘vibrant matter’ is implemented as the means of understanding change. In this approach all materials are viewed as vibrant and in flux. These ideas are used to create a heterogeneous view of change where assemblages, or parts of assemblages, may change at varying speeds and rhythms and at many different scales. These ideas are explored through the case study of changing burial practices between 3000 and 1500 cal bc on the Isle of Man. I suggest that this kind of thinking allows us to study change differently, and explore the advantages of this approach for archaeology.

Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of assemblage, but in more recent years they have started problematizing it in interesting and innovative ways, beyond its common connotations of aggregation. Sociologists such as Manuel DeLanda and political philosophers such as Jane Bennett have been key influences in this move. These authors had adapted and modified the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In this article, an assemblage of sorts itself, I propose that we need to return to that original Deleuzian body of thinking and explore its richness further. Assemblages, temporary and deliberate heterogeneous arrangements of material and immaterial elements, are about the relationship of in-betweenness. I further suggest that sensoriality and affectivity, memory and multi-temporality are key features of assemblage thinking, and that assemblages also imply certain political effects. The omission of these features in the archaeological treatments of the concept may lead to mechanistic reincarnations of systems thinking, thus depriving the concept of its potential. Finally, I explore these ideas by considering communal eating and feasting events as powerful sensorial assemblages.

New discoveries from a Californian cave have found a remarkable assemblage of cached perishable and other artefacts. Comprised of baskets, cordage, bone, antler, leather, food residues and other materials, the assemblages are dispersed through four caves in the largest ever cache discovered in the borderland region attributable to the native Californian linguistic group known as the Chumash. This paper develops a methodology based upon DeLanda's philosophy of assemblages and Graeber's anthropological theory of value. Importantly, following Normark, it is argue that assemblage theory needs to be operationalized into a methodological approach in order to apply it archaeologically. This methodology illustrate how a capacity analysis of the Cache Cave assemblage relates to values within the society which cached it by revealing the relational capacities within assemblages and relative capacities between them. Importantly, as a scalable approach, capacity analysis allows the investigation of the heterogeneous dynamics within complex societies.

The religious temperature of post-Reformation early modern England was constantly over-heating. Given that Protestant belief was frequently challenged by residual dissent, religious identity of whatever kind was crucial to both individual and parochial cosmological understanding. Hence, the many spatial, sensory, material and performative changes which were visited on parish churches over this period were designed to shape and redirect belief, but could also act to confuse believers. In order to penetrate this mass of religious reaction and response, I employ Assemblage Theory, particularly that of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, whose thinking is currently strongly influential amongst archaeologists. Using her work on the vitality of matter and the importance of the assemblage as a phenomenon containing material, non-material and human components, I apply a selection of her ideas to diagnostic elements of being and belief visible in the religious activities and materiality of the early modern parish church. While I refrain from discussing particular human individuals or groups, my chosen examples are intended to foreground the ontology of early modern parishioners, their perception of their hierarchical status within Anglican cosmology, their territorial conceptions of religious space and the workings of time as seen through the sequential assemblages of monumental tombs. Following Bennett, but departing from the current archaeological concentration on the primacy of materiality, this essay is designed to plug some of the people-shaped holes which are sometimes left unfilled by their surrounding material networks.

This paper provides a commentary on the other contributions to this special section. It offers an extended reflection on some emergent themes in this collection, themes which resonate with my own perspective on assemblage theory. Two issues in particular are addressed: typology and time.

This article argues that artefact types and typologies are kinds of assemblages, presenting an explicitly relational interpretation of typology grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. In the process it evaluates recent approaches to typology, and the interpretations these typologies have supported, and compares these with approaches which emphasize materiality and experience. It then illustrates the benefit of drawing these two angles of analysis closer together within an approach grounded in a more-than-representational assemblage theory. Throughout, the discussion revolves around British Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age burials and types of artefacts commonly found within them. The core argument is that, if used appropriately, typologies are not constraints to the appreciation of distinctiveness, difference and relationality in the past, but can rather form an important tool in detecting those relations and making sense of different past ways of becoming.

The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the ‘great processes’ of change like the evolution of humanity, the colonization of the globe or the origins of agriculture, and focusing on the momentary, fleeting nature of a small-scale ethnographic present. Where archaeologists have attempted to integrate different scales the result has usually been to turn to Annales-influenced or time perspectivism-driven approaches and their fixed, linear and ontologically incompatible layers of history. In contrast, I will use assemblages to examine how we can rethink both the emergence of multiple scales and their role in history, without reducing the differences of the small-scale to an epiphenomenal outcome of larger events, or treating large-scale historical processes as mere reifications of the ‘real’ on-the-ground stuff of daily life. As we will see, this approach also has consequences for the particular kind of reality we accord to large-scale archaeological categories.

This contribution contrasts ‘Assemblage theory’ with more traditional archaeological understandings of the term ‘assemblage’. It is argued that the flat ontology of assemblage theory is productive, particularly in relation to scale, enabling archaeologists to describe their own materials more precisely. However, more traditional ‘assemblages’, perhaps as a result of the more restrictive view they provide, should not be neglected, as they generate particularly archaeological perspectives and effects.