The Mayak Chemical Combine was one of the most secretive places in the Soviet Union. It was built in the southern Urals, close to Kyshtym. The facility produced weapons-grade plutonium and other radioactive isotopes for the Soviet nuclear military programme. Fugitives from behind the Iron Curtain mentioned the site, usually due to accidents and peculiar, unexplained observations. Such reports were often treated in the West as exaggerated or fictional, as they spoke of large-scale disasters, deportations and vast landscape transformations. This paper aims to present the research potential of declassified Cold War intelligence records for archaeological landscape studies of off-limits military sites. To outline a somewhat broader perspective, I will combine those sources with contemporary historical knowledge and modern remote sensing data. The analysis will be focused on the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] satellite imagery (CORONA and GAMBIT) from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s. The discussed sources recorded outcomes of nuclear disasters, hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited wasteland, abandoned villages, disappearing lakes, dying forests, diverted rivers, and other features related to this clandestine plutonium facility.

By investigating the materiality of colonial encounters, specifically the consumption of introduced commodities by Indigenous peoples, archaeologists can explore questions concerning value, agency, consumer choice and localization. This has the significant capacity to broaden understandings of intercultural encounters and challenge colonial narratives. Glass beads represent one of the earliest foreign material culture introductions to the Indigenous peoples of Australia. The rock-shelter site of Madjedbebe, best known for yielding the oldest evidence to date for human occupation in Australia, also contains one of the largest assemblages from an Indigenous site context in Australia—51 glass beads and associated fragments. We present here an analysis of these objects—through attribute and microwear analysis—in concert with the archival record, to reveal the ways in which Bininj (Aboriginal people) incorporated glass beads into their own lifeways.

The Bronze to Iron Age transition in Crete, a period of state collapse and insecurity, saw the island's rugged, high-contrast topography used in striking new ways. The visual drama of many of the new site locations has stimulated significant research over the last hundred years, with explanation of the change as the main focus. The new sites are not monumental in character: the vast majority are settlements, and much of the information about them comes from survey. Perhaps as a result, the new site map has not been much studied from phenomenological perspectives. A focus on the visual and experiential aspects of the new landscape can offer valuable insights into social structures at this period, and illuminate social developments prefiguring the emergence of polis states in Crete by c. 700 bc. To develop, share and evaluate this type of integrated study, digital reconstructive techniques are still under-used in this region. I highlight their potential value in addressing a regularly-identified shortcoming of phenomenological approaches — their necessarily subjective emphasis.

In ‘Humanist Missteps’, Matthew Greer makes the pointed observation that non-anthropocentric frameworks, including symmetrical, object-oriented and posthuman feminist archaeologies, have primarily focused on deconstructing the human–non-human binary while failing to problematize humanist assumptions about who counts as Human. At the core of Greer's argument is the matter of citational practice: which social theorists are archaeologists referencing in their efforts to craft relational approaches to humans, things, animals and plants? In answering this question, the author points to a notable lack of Black Studies theorists, particularly the work of Sylvia Wynter, Zakkiyah Jackson and Tiffany King, in posthumanist archaeologies. While I agree with Greer's critiques, his essay stops short of explaining this citational silence. In this brief commentary, I suggest that this absence of Black Studies scholarship reflects the fact that the discipline of archaeology remains a ‘white public space’ (Brodkin et al. 2011: 545) and maintains an artificial division between analysis and activism.

Swan images (Cygnus sp.) are the most common symbols at petroglyph sites on the eastern shore of Lake Onega, northwest Russia, where rock engraving most likely occurred around the mid-Neolithic period. At some sites they constitute over 60 per cent of all glyphs and they are the only glyph type common to all sites. The abundance of swan symbols at a given Onega site correlates most strongly with the abundance of cervids (mostly elk). There are even partially superimposed elk–swan engravings where part of one animal contributes to the other's body. There is evidence that, during the mid-Neolithic, early sites at Lake Onega were submerged by rising water levels, most probably coinciding with a period of climatic cooling. By that point, new petroglyph sites had been created further north by the Vodla river. Here swan images are larger and more abundant and other glyphs (such as solar/lunar) are absent. It is suggested that the swan was a supernatural symbol. Its prominence at the more recent Vodla sites may be indicative of greater importance being given to this species in the context of environmental change and an associated greater struggle for survival. Thus, the swan symbol may have been perceived by the local Neolithic Finno-Ugric people as an agent for the intended reversal or control of such external challenges, and selected from a pre-existing mythological framework based on its associated traits and perceived powers.

The first millennium bc brought warfare to the interior of Egypt on a significant scale. We have two vivid records, one written and the other pictorial. The former is a first-person narrative of the Napatan (Sudanese) king Piankhy who, having gained control of the south of Egypt, embarked in 730 bc on a methodical subjugation of the rest of the country, then under the rule of several local families. During the seemingly irresistible northward progress of his army Piankhy makes frequent reference to walls with battlements and gates which could be countered with siege towers/battering rams and the erection of earthen ramps, although Piankhy himself preferred the tactic of direct storming. Within the circuit of these walls lay treasuries and granaries and, in the case of the city of Hermopolis in Middle Egypt, the palace of the local king Nemlut together with its stables for horses.

Much detail regarding the early development of stone architecture in Egypt remains unclear. Prevailing studies tend to focus on the contribution of religious and socio-economic factors, but the role of environmental elements should not be understated. For much of the First Dynasty, innovation in stone architecture was driven by developments in the private realm, a result of favourable geology in Lower Egypt. Meanwhile, multiple strands of evidence suggest that Egypt experienced wetter climatic conditions during the Early Dynastic period and the Old Kingdom. This would have had major implications on both the production of mudbrick and the short-term durability of mudbrick structures. It is argued that these environmental factors played a key role in facilitating and accelerating the rise of stone architecture in Egypt.

The processes leading to the formation of early state societies remain one of the key topics of archaeological research. Few of these early states are as famous or evocative as that of ancient Egypt, a land of dramatic monuments and terrain, with mysterious and exotic religious practices and a distinctive and exotic iconography. But was Egypt the gift of the Nile, as the Greek historian Herodotus alleged? In this new book, Toby Wilkinson draws attention to a relatively neglected part of the Egyptian landscape: not the fertile river valley, but the deserts which fringe it to east and west. It is here in the deserts, he argues, that the origins of the Egyptian state are to be found. In recent millennia, the deserts have been hostile environments of rock and sand. Go back before 3000 bc, however, and a rather different picture emerges. This different picture is of a desert hinterland peopled by nomadic groups who spent part of their year in the Nile valley. It suggests a more mobile view of Egyptian Predynastic society than has usually been supposed. Desert and valley may have functioned together in a classic pattern of complementarity between contrasting environmental zones, with cattle herds perhaps moved from valley floor to desert in step with the cyclical pattern of the seasons. The specific ingredient which Wilkinson uses to link valley and desert during the fourth millennium bc is rock art. Egyptian rock art has not yet been properly recognized as a rich and important repertoire by specialists in the burgeoning field of rock art as whole. Surveys over more than a century, however, have revealed numerous groups of pecked and engraved images on the desert cliffs and boulders, and recent expeditions (including those by Wilkinson himself) are continually adding to the corpus. The Egyptian desert rock art is generally less well-known than the vivid rock paintings of the central Sahara (such as the famous Tassili frescoes), though it too conveys the image of a greener more habitable landscape. Wilkinson ties specific motifs found in the desert rock art to iconography from the Nile valley during the fourth millennium and later. Yet the linkages and chronologies remain controversial, along with the central hypothesis. Did the desiccation of the savannas lead to the formation of the Egypt, forcing the scattered pastoralist populations to withdraw to a cultivated Nile valley? Was Egypt the gift of the deserts, not the Nile? In this Review Feature the hypothesis is examined by specialists working in Egypt and Nubia, and the reliability of the supporting evidence is assessed.

Geoglyphs are widely seen as an expression of past sacred landscapes. In this article, I offer a new theoretical approach to geoglyphs, interpreting them as a distinctly anarchic and decentralized medium for ritual activity. When we define geoglyphs as large-scale images, and exclude other phenomena such as earthworks, it is clear that their occurrence is actually quite limited in space and time. Almost all known examples of geoglyphs are located in the Americas, and they are particularly associated with ‘middle-range’ societies, rather than states or empires. Geoglyphs produced by hunter-gatherer communities are also comparatively rare. I regard this pattern as a direct consequence of the anarchist affordances of the geoglyph medium. In agricultural societies where regional integration and incipient centralization were taking place (e.g. the ancient Nasca), geoglyphs provided a decentralizing counterbalance. I therefore theorize the incorporation of geoglyph-based ritual practices as a historically situated process of constitutional reform, whereby ancient peoples consciously sought to redistribute power and authority.

This paper presents an experiment. Can a typologically inarticulate assemblage be accounted for by other means? What might such an articulation look like? What prospects would it offer? Focusing on three small late Pottery Neolithic assemblages from the southern Levant, the paper argues that they are typologically inarticulate, primarily because they possess considerable morphological fluidity that is at odds with the segmented structure demanded by this mode of classification. The paper presents an attempt to formulate an account of these assemblages that incorporates their morphological fluidity and ambiguity. Allowing for differential quantitative emphases across the assemblage, it is suggested that certain forms may be specified as types. In turn, the relations among these types are shown to constitute a structural order. Yet the assemblages are also fundamentally ambivalent, both constituting and de-constituting their order and logic. For the types are constituted in relative (rather than absolute) terms and the orderly structures are accompanied by elements that are incommensurable with it. Acknowledging these conflicting qualities, it is proposed that they are multiple, that the one assemblage is several. Finally, the paper explores some implications this understanding of the ceramic assemblages might have for the discussion of temporal development.