In this article, I set out a relational approach to Andean art, with the aim of investigating, in broad terms, the making, viewing and experience of art among pre-Hispanic peoples. The analysis draws upon the ideas of art historians, as well as upon the work of ethnographers and archaeologists, to integrate theoretical approaches that consider animacy and the ways art objects gain significance as part of assemblages. Examining four aspects of Andean art: (1) insistence; (2) abstraction; (3) networks and linkages; and (4) affect and embodied experience, I conclude that the term ‘art’ (as an analytic category) overlaps poorly with Andean categories of cognition, sociality and material practice. Archaeologists can usefully refocus attention on the ways these craft items were made, used in daily life, displayed in rituals and ultimately deposited in the places where they were found.

Together, the concepts of heterarchy and collective action offer potential explanations for how early state societies may have established high degrees of civic coordination and sophisticated craft industries in the absence of exclusionary political strategies or dominant centralized political hierarchies. The Indus civilization (c. 2600–1900 bc ) appears to have been heterarchical, which raises critical questions about how its infrastructure facilitated collective action. Digital re-visitation of early excavation reports provides a powerful means of re-examining the nuances of the resulting datasets and the old interpretations offered to explain them. In an early report on excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the Indus civilization's largest city, Ernest Mackay described a pair of small non-residential structures at a major street intersection as a ‘hostel’ and ‘office’ for the ‘city fathers’. In this article, Mackay's interpretation that these structures had a public orientation is tested using a geographical information systems approach (GIS) and 3D models derived from plans and descriptions in his report. In addition to supporting aspects of Mackay's interpretation, the resulting analysis indicates that Mohenjo-daro's architecture changed through time, increasingly favouring smaller houses and public structures. Close examination of these small public structures also suggests that they may at times have been part of a single complex.

The old are rarely the focus of research in archaeology. Older skeletonized bodies are hard to give a chronological age, and this seems to justify the lack of research focus. In this paper I argue that the old are not naturally invisible to archaeologists, but have been made so by a focus on chronology at the expense of the bodily and by our ambivalence towards the ageing process. I suggest that, rather than applying numbers to skeletons, we should focus our research on understanding the ageing of the body itself in archaeological contexts, and the relationships between processes of continuity and processes of decline. This is achieved through analysis of four aspects of embodied ageing: changes in appearance; in bodily function; in age-related disease; and in skill. The ageing body is not invisible: it is present, variable and a rich resource for future archaeological analyses.

Burial grounds are increasingly being considered as components of lived urban environments in the past. This paper considers how the ancient Egyptian city of Akhetaten, built by king Akhenaten (c. 1349–1332 bc), was constructed and experienced as a space inhabited both by the living and the dead. Drawing upon results from ongoing excavations at the burial grounds of the general population, it considers how the archaeological record of the settlement and its cemeteries segue and explores how the nature of burial landscapes and the need to maintain reflexive relationships between the living and the dead in the midst of a changing religious milieu contributed to the unique character of Akhetaten as a city. It asks what kind of city Akhetaten was, and what it was like to live through the Amarna period.

Carolyn Dean's essay of 2006, ‘The Trouble with (the Term) Art’, offers a provocative set of challenges to the very notion of archaeological art. This essay attempts to refocus some of Dean's questions and to answer them by exploring different lines of evidence, especially through the development of the art museum in the twentieth century. Finally, the author explores whether the twenty-first century observer can gain insight into the meanings of some ancient materials by consideration of their destruction.

This paper examines a central concern in archaeological research: the interplay between technological and social flux over the longue durée. This is done by describing ceramic technological continuity and change, and its correspondence with broader social processes, on the northeast coast of New Guinea in the recent past. It presents new ethnographic information from Madang, Papua New Guinea, involving Bilbil and Yabob potters, to outline the chaîne opératoire of pottery production at present. Comparisons with ethnohistorical texts then allow us to model technological change over a longer period of c. 150 years, following the direct historical approach. This shows distinct continuity, but also substantial modification throughout the nineteenth–twenty-first centuries, as the potters negotiated major social upheavals during the colonial and post-independence periods, such as forcible relocation from their offshore islands onto the mainland. This expands our understanding of how social and technological change can take place amongst small-scale, part-time pottery specialists over the longue durée and how this change is reflected in the finished products and raw materials.

Can archaeology make sense of art ‘after interpretation’? Post-human scholarship suggests that conventional approaches to art, guided by Cartesian ontology, fail to account for the deeper kinship between things and thoughts. But the growing disillusionment with representation leaves art and the semiotic questions it raises in limbo. Can we recover an adequate social theory of art, semiosis and the subject in a post-humanist world? I submit that we can by building on Eduardo Kohn's thesis that life beyond the human is constitutively semiotic. Art, as a semiotic involution of life's animating processes, is form-taking and form-replicating activity. This form-taking is open-ended and prospective, continuously reaching beyond itself to refigure specific cases as general kinds. This occasions a process of emergence through which novel ‘reals’—including societies and selves—are produced. Extending Sahlins’ definition of kinship to include human/non-human relations, I argue that seventeenth-century Iroquoian art was about kinning—the making of relatives—and its power to form and reform relations of all sorts was central to its success.

For well over a century, archaeology has been animated by the construction—and, increasingly, the critique—of grand narratives surveying the evolution of politics, economics, technologies, religion and so on. Deep histories of ‘art’ have not been pursued with comparable energy. This essay explores why this is so, and it considers what might be gained from extending the distinctively archaeological approach to human history to include analyses of long-term shifts in the organization and functions of images. In doing so, it proposes that notions of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ drawn from art-historical conversations might profitably be redeployed to examine deeper cross-cultural patterns.

The concept of art has proved controversial in archaeology and anthropology. Many feel that the concept, developed to fit high art in modern Western society, is inappropriate for objects made for other uses, in other times, or in other cultures. Yet there is no widely agreed critique or alternative concept. This introduction reviews responses to this dilemma, ranging from using the concept uncritically, using the term ‘art’ simply as an archaeological convenience to refer to things such as petroglyphs and figurines, and treating art simply as material culture. It then explores the recent concepts of art as affective material culture, as socially defined networks, and as locally defined aesthetic action. Finally, it raises the possibility that art is our local category of the kind of powerful objects found in many cultures.

The Blackfoot bison hunters of the North American Plains are widely known for their artfully painted lodges commonly known as ‘tipis’. Traditionally, tipi designs were not for everyone; rather, they were received individually from the spirit world or ceremonially transferred from one person to another under strict covenants. Painted tipis advertised the spiritual and social stature of their owners and were intricately woven in the ontological fabric of the group. This article explores the role of the painted tipi in individual and social life among the Blackfoot to highlight how art can be used to construct social places, to accumulate material and ritual wealth and, ultimately, to make society.

Soils provide a striking demonstration of conviviality, thanks to the intensity and abundance of lively interaction seething within them. Soils constitute and generate life precisely through the symbiotic interaction, collaboration and competition of an enormous range of partners. Engaging with some specific soils in central Cyprus demonstrates how this conviviality works. Soil-places are created by very precise combinations of soil players, both non-human and human. Humans can join these partners in helping the soil to grow, through constructions of check dams to catch sediments and moisture. They can use soil to construct houses, demonstrating deep local knowledge and close partnership with the soils, and often recognizing the conviviality that provides a foundation for their lives in the landscape. As our soils today are catastrophically degraded and lost, the need to engage with the conviviality of soil is all the more urgent.

This project sees archaeology and art as a political tool for disrupting conventional, politically loaded narratives of the past. Rather than producing institutionally safe narratives conventionally certified as truth, archaeologists should follow the lead of artists who use the past as a source of materials to be reconfigured in new ways to help people see in new ways. Using as an example the works of the Canadian artist Ken Monkman, who subverts nineteenth- century landscape painting to reinsert the missing critiques of Anglo-American colonialism, dominance of nature, and heteronormativity, this paper advocates disarticulating materials from the past by severing them from their context, repurposing them to bring contemporary concerns to the fore and creating new, disruptive visions from them. The article proposes the practice of an art/archaeology.

Humans have been producing ‘art’ for at least 75,000 years. But the word ‘art’ is problematic when applied to archaeology. This paper explores the use of the concept of ‘visually complex object’ to designate a very specific kind of what is generally known as ‘art’. I argue for the application of this concept to the analysis of both the design of objects and their arrangement in cultural spaces, to gain new perspectives on social and political change in a prehistoric complex society. The focus here is on visually enchanting objects and changes in the ways that such objects were used and arranged in relation to larger changes in cultural circumstances. I contrast two visual orders in Iron Age Europe—the mid final millennium bc, when the visual order of ‘princely graves’ and the eye-fixing qualities of objects focused attention on the persons of individuals competing for leadership positions; and the second and final centuries bc, when a new visual order emerged to focus attention on large, publicly deployed objects that directed attention in open spaces to create collective experiences. The principles developed from these examples from late prehistoric Europe can be applied to changes in other complex societies worldwide.