Human communities belonging to different times and places often adopt a set of ideal rules, sometimes related to alimentary prescriptions. For different reasons, foods and/or specific resources are, in fact, prohibited to some social or religious groups, but sometimes these can elaborate special strategies to find a compromise between a high social status and the access to ‘prohibited’ resources. For past societies, a careful archaeological study, crossing data emerging from a multidisciplinary approach, written contemporary sources and the rules the community must follow, can depict what was an interplay of ideal rules and actual practice. The paper aims to study a significant population of the past, namely an early medieval monastic community, from a human ecology perspective, but also investigating food storage and preparation at the time, along with the practical respect of the Benedictine Rule about foods with its social implications. The site under study is San Vincenzo Abbey, one of the most important monastic power centres in Italy, which was destroyed in 881 ad by a Saracen raid followed by a destructive fire. This caused the collapse of some structures sealing the contexts of the kitchen's complex, thereby preserving many bioarchaelogical remains related to daily monastic life.

Depictions of mythical beings appear in many different forms of art world-wide, including rock art of various ages. In this paper we explore a particular type of imagery, back-to-back figures, consisting of two human-like figures or animals of the same species next to each other and facing in opposite directions. Some human-like doubles were joined at the back rather than side-by-side, but also face opposite directions. In this paper, we report on new research on rock art, bark paintings and recent paintings on paper and chart a 9000-year history of making aesthetically, symbolically and spiritually powerful back-to-back figures in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia.

In this paper we study several panels with incised engravings, which have been discovered in recent years, from two shelters in the area of the River Martín (Teruel), Cañada de Marco and Los Borriquitos. They are of great scientific interest for several reasons. Firstly, because they represent an expansion of the Late Upper Palaeolithic engraving facies of Mediterranean Iberia, limited until now to ten sites. In these two new sites, these incised engravings are underlying Levantine and Schematic pictographs, and occasionally are interstratified with Levantine paintings, an exceptional fact which is published in its entirety for the first time. These stratigraphic relationships reflect continuity/change dynamics during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition and throughout the Holocene artistic cycle, topics which are crucial on a European scale. Finally, we have identified iconographic continuities between Epimagdalenian engravings and Levantine art, suggesting a possible link between these two graphic expressions. These findings may constitute solid support for the hypothesis about the pre-Neolithic origin of the exceptional Levantine art of the Iberian peninsula.

In memoriam Ramiro Alloza

Studies of introduced subject matter in rock-art assemblages typically focus on themes of cross-cultural interaction, change and continuity, power and resistance. However, the economic frameworks guiding or shaping the production of an assemblage have often been overlooked. In this paper we use a case study involving a recently recorded assemblage of introduced subject matter from Marra Country in northern Australia's southwest Gulf of Carpentaria region to explore their production using a hybrid economy framework. This framework attempts to understand the nature of the forces that shape people's engagement with country and subsequently how it is being symbolically marked as adjustments to country occur through colonization. We argue that embedding these motifs into a hybrid economy context anchored in the pastoral industry allows for a more nuanced approach to cross-cultural interaction studies and adds another layer to the story of Aboriginal place-marking in colonial contexts. This paper aims to go beyond simply identifying motifs thought to represent introduced subject matter, and the cross-cultural framework(s) guiding their interpretation, and instead to direct attention to the complex network of relations that potentially underpin the production of such motifs.

This article uses results from the recent excavations at Çatalhöyük in Turkey to propose that continuous tensions between egalitarian and hierarchical impulses were dealt with in two principal ways during the Neolithic of the Middle East. A tendency towards overall balance and community (termed molar) is seen as in tension with more particulate and molecular tendencies, with both being brought into play in order to combat inequalities. It is also suggested that tendencies towards more molecular systems increased over time, at different rates and in different ways in different places, partly as a response to constraints associated with more molar articulations. Finally, it is proposed that a shift to molecular autonomy was associated with agricultural intensification. Staying egalitarian can be seen as an active process that contributed to the Neolithic transformations.

Discussions of spatial relationships are persistent features of research on the organization of craft production. Despite the centrality of spatial issues, the correspondence between spatial patterning and economic organization remains relatively under-theorized, especially around questions of power and control. Drawing from the literature on craft ecology, specialization and landscape archaeology, I develop an approach that considers spatial scales of patterning, the power projection of elites and institutions and the articulation between elements of the crafting landscape. This approach recognizes the complex sets of factors affecting spatial patterning and ultimately produces a more robust understanding of how ancient economic systems were organized. These ideas are explored through a case study on Late Bronze and Early Iron Age metal production in the Caucasus, clarifying the organizational logics of the metal economy and highlighting how this industry differed in significant ways from other contemporary metal-producing regions in the ancient Near East.

Posthuman feminism grows out of interdisciplinary discourse exploring relational metaphysics. It is set apart from other approaches in the broader ontological turn by its central ethical claim: by actively forming kinship or alliances among human and non-humans, we can overcome major challenges of today's world and create a better future. Archaeologists and anthropologists are well situated to investigate this claim, as we already work with worlds unstructured by western dichotomies. This paper explores one such past world—Iron and Viking Age Scandinavia—to ask how alternative more-than-human relationships may work in practice. Specifically, we examine the relations among swords, animals, houses and humans in the first millennium ce, assessing ethical commitments within Butler's framework of grievability. We argue that the picture that emerges is fundamentally relational and unfamiliar, with complex articulations of bodies and personhood criss-crossing human–object divides; however, the ethical commitments of this world leave us deeply uncomfortable. Thus, although we welcome posthuman feminism's call to ontological openness, we caution against too easy an association between more-than-human kinship and ethical projects.

This essay explores Braidotti's nomadic subject as the starting point for a posthumanist perspective for the interpretation of ethnographic and ancient pastoral societies. Why has women's labour and positionality in such societies tended to be ignored by archaeology? The author's autobiographical discussion of her earlier work on village and transhumant pastoralists in Greece frames her personal discovery of gender and power dynamics in mobile societies. The main case study, however, examines the household archaeology of Iron Age Saka (eastern variants of Scythians) and later pastoral groups in order to put forth hypotheses about gendered production in semi-sedentary societies. Haraway's concept of the cyborg and Braidotti's concept of the nomadic subject are examined. Material studies of ceramic serving dishes, household debris and house form at an Iron Age agropastoral settlement apply some of the concepts of new feminisms. A comparison is drawn between the philosophy of nomadology and the anthropological archaeology of pastoral nomads.

Architecture has been one of the key features in studying the first millennium bc in the Balearic Islands. The primary goal of this research is to analyse how monumental communal architecture enabled the construction of enduring social spaces and how the role of these spaces within the community can be understood through the relations that conform across the landscape. To do so we will focus on the Late Bronze Age (1100–850 bc) and the Talayotic period (c. 850–650 bc), the first moment when cyclopean dry-stone architecture is used in communal spaces, such as talayots or stepped turriforms, making them stand out across the landscape. To understand how these architectures are connected, we analysed the visual connections between them through intervisibility and network analysis, as well as through Individual Distance Viewsheds. Through the analysis of visual connections, we seek to understand how the architecture created a network across the entire landscape, and how the characteristics and properties of this network are key in understanding the relationship between Talayotic communities and their landscape. Our aim is to explore how architecture shaped and gave meaning to the landscape and how we cannot understand the buildings by themselves, but as part of a network.

What can a body do? To answer Baruch Spinoza's question, we engage with posthumanist feminist concepts of nomadic subjectivity and relations with non-humans. Through an exploration of two ‘patches’, the Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacama Desert in South America and the burials at Wor Barrow in the Neolithic of southern England, we suggest that these approaches open up a new way of encountering past bodies. What capabilities do bodies, past and present, have? This question is one in which bodies’ capacities are revealed as immanent, historically contextual and emergent.

Investigation of British Mesolithic and Neolithic genomes suggests discontinuity between the two and has been interpreted as indicating a significant migration of continental farmers, displacing the indigenous population. These incomers had already acquired some hunter-gatherer genetic heritage before their arrival, and this increased little in Britain. However, the proportion of hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry in British Neolithic genomes is generally greater than for most contemporary examples on the continent, particularly in emerging evidence from northern France, while the ultimate origin of British Neolithic populations in Iberia is open to question. Both the date calculated for the arrival of new people in Britain and their westerly origin are at odds with other aspects of the existing evidence. Here, a two-phase model of Neolithization is proposed. The first appearance of Neolithic things and practices significantly predated a more substantial transfer of population, creating the conditions under which new communities could be brought into being. The rather later establishment of a major migration stream coincided with an acceleration in the spread of Neolithic artefacts and activities, as well as an enrichment of the Neolithic material assemblage.

Early urban societies feature specialized processes that integrate disparate populations as part of their social construction. One such process is commensalism and the associated display of exotica from interregional interaction. Hosts of a feast between 400 and 300 bce at the early urban centre of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, displayed pottery that manifested relationships with urban elites at Monte Albán and other regions of Oaxaca, but also expressed connections with something fundamentally different. The hosts sacrificed a greenstone sculpture in the Mezcala style from Guerrero state, located to the west and previously unknown in Oaxaca aesthetics. The discovery of this figure contributes to reassessing the extent of interaction during a time often marked by regionalism in Oaxaca as well as providing information on the little-known Mezcala civilization. A relational ontology explores how the discovery of this agentive object and the alterity of its aesthetics facilitates understanding perceptions of distant others or imaginaries, and how such entanglements facilitated processes of status differentiation for nascent urban elites, particularly their role as mediators.

This paper explores the potential of posthumanist feminism in archaeology. We find ourselves exhausted in the face of the continuing inequalities in our discipline and the volatile political times we live in, where discrimination and xenophobia, entangled with the patriarchy, create a toxic mix. In the face of this, we draw inspiration from ongoing activism within archaeology and the emergence of posthumanist feminism beyond archaeology. We consider the juxtaposition between activism in the discipline and the lack of engagement with the same issues in our theory. Posthumanist feminism is explored as a way to unite theory and activism. It connects to and builds on existing feminisms but is argued to differ in three ways: first, posthumanist feminism widens the scope of those for whom we should be working to achieve equality; second, it suggests radical shifts in our ontology are necessary to bring about equality; third, it develops an alternative approach to difference. We explore the potential for posthumanist feminism to reshape narratives about the past, the way we do archaeology, and archaeological activism. In each, the aim is to turn away from the majoritarian subject and to make space for multiple alternative voices to emerge and thrive in archaeology.

The relationship between handmilling, undertaken in domestic contexts, and mechanized mills in medieval Kent is used to challenge linear approaches to economic progress in the Middle Ages. Inspired by posthuman perspectives which emphasize messiness, non-linearity and multiplicity, medieval economic development is re-imagined as a patchwork of intensive material processes. In so doing, an approach is developed which works towards dissolving problematic binaries between gendered labour, domestic and economic spheres and the Middle Ages and modernity.

Inference to religion and ritual does not require scripture. Since the early twentieth century, archaeologists have identified hundreds of deposits containing Buddhist scriptures, images and ritual objects throughout the Japanese archipelago, the majority dating to the late Heian period (794–1185 ce). Previous research suggests that scripture was the central feature of these deposits. This article argues that these deposits resulted from a range of highly variable contexts of religious and social practice, not limited to a focus on scripture. I survey early excavations and interpretations of sutra burial and then turn to two main case studies. These examples show that these deposits were complex assemblages that implicated diverse religious meanings, time frames and social actors. Scripture deposits can demonstrate how religious ritual illuminates, underwrites and interweaves variant scales of agency, time and social practice.

Cassowaries (Casuarius) are one of the largest indigenous animal species of New Guinea. Researchers have long been trying to understand their local socio-cultural significance. Here we present new results from interviews recorded in 2018 on ethnography associated with bone daggers, a material culture ornament and tool carved from the cassowary's tibiotarsus. We present a ‘storied notion’—a contemporary narrative from oral history of why cassowary is not simply a bird, and briefly describe cassowary bone ornamentation in Auwim, East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. By exploring the material history of Casuarius through a ‘storied notion’ approach, we reveal that cassowary bone daggers in rock art are narrative ideas of the species from its landscape to ornamentation and through to people's cosmological beliefs surrounding Casuarius. We argue that the cassowary bone dagger stencil can be seen as part of the life history of this animal.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of the metalworker in the northwest Iberian Iron Age. By adopting a holistic and diachronic perspective, a broad review of the influence of metalworking and its agents on the social structuring of the communities of the Atlantic seaboard is presented. With the aim of exploring the implications of metallurgy and the blacksmith's activity, a new perspective of metalworking is suggested. Thus, an exploration of perspectives beyond the technical aspects will be addressed, considering the ‘technological dimension’ as part of all the elements that define this activity. The objective of the work is to present a narrative that allows analysis of the role of the metalworker throughout different historical periods, focusing on the social, technical and symbolic dynamics that have shaped its development.

This paper explores notions of relationality and emotional communities to re-tell accounts of women's lives in the nineteenth century ce and second half of the sixth millennium bce, within the framework of posthumanist feminism. We argue that in both of these contexts women's work, spaces and material cultures have been devalued in comparison with those categorized as masculine. To counter androcentric accounts, we consider how different tasks and forms of material culture can create ‘emotional communities’ among groups, forming shared participation in social worlds. Our focus is first the mourning cultures of the Victorian period in the UK, where we argue objects of emotion may have operated to create shared spaces outside of the home, breaking down oppositions of domestic and private. Second, we turn to the ways in which tasks considered female have been downplayed in the Neolithic of central Europe, exploring the assemblages of bodies, grinding stones and hide working to show how emotional currents may have flowed through these materials, creating experiences of aging and different forms of prestige. In conclusion, we argue that the concept of emotional communities provides a useful methodology to answer the challenge set by posthumanist feminism of thinking difference as positive.