Western Anatolian ritual pits provide valuable insights into socio-cultural, economic and symbolic practices during the Early to Middle Bronze Age. Findings in feasting pits, such as carbonized seeds and animal bones, indicate a strong link between ritual and food. Standing stones, altars and carefully arranged artefacts suggest a symbolic and sacred dimension beyond mere ceremonies. The pits from this period contain carbonized seeds and fragments of wood, indicating the presence of small fires during certain rituals. Changing features in ritual pits from the Early to Middle Bronze Age reveal a dynamic relationship between spatial arrangements and religious practices. The study shows that in the first half of the second millennium bce several ritual activities known from different regions reached western Anatolia for the first time. Interregional trade involved not only goods, but also the dissemination of rituals over a wide geographical area. This cultural interaction reveals western Anatolia as a dynamic and influential centre in this historical period. By exploring the ritual practices of second-millennium bce western Anatolia, this paper presents new perspectives on the rituals of the region.

This paper uses material efficacy as an analytical position to consider how silver helped to shape large-scale historical trajectories in Iron Age Scotland. Roman silver entered Scotland as imperial matter beginning in the first century ad and later inspired an assemblage of indigenous wearable silver in the fourth–fifth centuries. I investigate the human–silver collaborations involved in the transition from hoarding Roman silver coins to recycling Roman Hacksilber. By tracing the object trajectory of spiral rings, I show how silver's material properties and entanglements played a role in developing Scotland's earliest silver products. Around the fourth century, a diversity of spiral rings was replaced by a specific style of silver spiral finger ring. Silver brought to Iron Age Scotland by the Romans inspired and afforded individuals in northern Britain a new and empowering regional socio-political identity. Material efficacy, as explored in this case study, has relevance beyond Iron Age/Roman studies to any anthropological investigation of underrepresented human agency.

This article identifies large-scale chiastic and bracketing structures in contemporary, colonial and Classic Maya verbal art and literature. These structures are composed of the repetition of lines, verses and stanzas that frame sections of texts and sometimes images. Initially, the argument focuses on an ethnopoetic analysis that directs attention to such forms in modern and colonial narrative and presents an extended contemporary Yucatecan story to illustrate key forms. Second, it turns to similar structures in Classic Mayan narrative written in Maya hieroglyphs to examine the way rhetorical and linguistic tropes intertwined with corresponding features in visual compositions to craft highly sophisticated artistic programmes. By tracking how specific structures are deployed and in what contexts, this article defines an aesthetic that not only sheds light on verbal narratives, but also elucidates visual programmes and their interrelationship with text to reveal a fundamental principle in Maya world conceptualization. This literary and visual analysis develops a cross-medial Maya aesthetics comparable to other global poetic traditions.

Research on rock art around the world takes for granted the premise that rock art, as a product of the Upper Palaeolithic symbolic revolution, is a natural behavioral expression of Homo sapiens, essentially reflecting new cognitive abilities and intellectual capacity of modern humans. New discoveries of Late Pleistocene rock art in Southeast Asia as well as recent dates of Neandertal rock art are also framed in this light. We contend in this paper that, contrary to this essentialist non-interpretation, rock art is a historical product. Most human groups have not made rock art. Rock art's main characteristic is its inherent territorial/spatial dimension. Moreover, or probably because of it, rock art is fundamentally associated with food-producing economies. The debate between the cognitive versus social and historical character of rock art is rarely explicitly addressed. In this paper we explore this historical dimension through examples from rock-art corpora worldwide: they provide key case studies to highlight the relevance of addressing the different temporalities of rock-art traditions, their interruptions and, therefore, their historical qualities.

In this paper, we examine the lunar calendar interpretation to evaluate whether it is a viable explanation for the production of Upper Palaeolithic parietal art. We consider in detail the history of this approach, focusing on recently published variations on this interpretation. We then discuss the scientific method and whether these recent studies are designed to address the research questions necessary to test a lunar calendar hypothesis. More broadly, we explore challenges related to inferring meaning in art of the deep past, the use of secondary sources and selecting appropriate ethnographic analogies. Finally, we assess claims that the lunar calendar interpretation documents the world's oldest (proto)writing system. We conclude that the lunar calendar interpretation as currently construed suffers from multiple theoretical and methodological weaknesses preventing it from being a viable explanation for the production of Upper Palaeolithic art. We further find that claims following from this interpretation to have discovered the oldest known (proto)writing system are unsubstantiated.

Hoards have played a significant role in our narratives of the European Bronze Age, but their purpose and meaning have been the source of much debate. These debates have been positively impacted by studies that investigate the ways in which hoards are connected to specific landscape contexts. In this paper, we discuss the outcome of one such in-depth field study of 62 Bronze Age metalwork deposition locations from the Swedish province of Halland. By systematically analysing digital sources such as museum archives, church records and historical maps, we were able to establish the locations of a number of previously unlocated finds, which were then visited in the field. Through this combined archival work and fieldwork, we distinguished several patterns that allude to a connection between metalwork deposits, object types and specific places in the landscape. These patterns shed light on the landscape context of hoards in this region and illuminate how deposition patterns changed over time; we consider some factors that may help to explain these changes. The results emphasize the importance of landscape studies for understanding the role of selective deposition in European Bronze Age societies, and more broadly, the social implications of hoards in their context.

Various authors have claimed over the years that Homo erectus had language. Since there is no direct evidence about the matter, this claim represents the conclusion of a multi-step composite inference drawn from putative non-linguistic attributes of the species. Three maritime behaviours are central among these attributes: crossing open seas to get to insular islands such as Flores in the Indian ocean and Crete in the Mediterranean; building complex watercraft for the crossings; and undertaking navigation in making the crossings. Dubbing it the ‘Seafaring Inference’, the present article reconstructs and appraises the way in which Barham and Everett use the Seafaring Inference to build a case for the claim that Homo erectus had language. This composite inference starts from certain lithic objects found on Flores and ends, via six simple inferences, with the conclusion that Homo erectus had a form of language. The main finding of the article is that this composite inference is flawed in including a simple inference which is unsound and, accordingly, cannot be used to make a strong case for the claim that Homo erectus had language. There is a less well-developed variant of the Seafaring Inference which proceeds from the recovery of lithic objects on Crete. This variant is found to be multiply flawed, there being several simple unsound simple inferences among its components.

Large walling projects are among the most visible features in the archaeological record. However, enclosure walls remain relatively under-theorized relative to other monumental buildings. In an attempt to move beyond simple explanations that analyse walls solely as defensive features or symbols, I link monumental walls to notions of sovereign power and action-oriented theories of value(s). Using examples from Pharaonic Egypt, I argue that monumental enclosure walls were attempts to define and realize particular social totalities, whether these were a temple complex, a royal tomb or an urban centre. If all efforts at border-making are also an exercise in power, walls have the potential to illuminate some of the goals and values of those ordering their construction. By analysing changes and continuities related to which structures required the protection of a monumental enclosure wall over time, it is possible to shed light on the fluid priorities of the most important political actors in Pharaonic society. Yet the very presence of a wall implies potential dissent and alternative practices—otherwise a wall's construction would not have been necessary.

This study investigates the effects that an encounter with a foreign object can have on local traditions. Notions of object agency and object biographies will be utilized to address what happens when people become entangled with new things: the new context can have an impact on the newly introduced object, and those newly introduced objects can similarly impact locals and their traditions. The Late Bronze Age southern Levantine site of Tel Burna will serve as a case study, where a number of imported Cypriot pithoi were found alongside locally produced pithoi. It will be demonstrated that in their new context, the Cypriot pithoi were given new meaning and function. At the same time, the imported pithoi played active roles in the local potters of Tel Burna making pithoi. However, the local pithoi resemble local storage jars, so while the potters mimicked the concept of the Cypriot pithoi, they did so according to local normative forms.

Southern Peru is home to one of the richest sites with rock art in South America—Toro Muerto. A unique aspect of the iconography of the petroglyphs of the site is the figures of dancing humans, the so-called danzantes, which are additionally frequently associated with geometric motifs, mostly variants of zigzag lines. Drawing upon intriguing data recorded during Reichel-Dolmatoff's research in Colombia related to the meaning of analogous motifs in Tukano art, as well as broader exploration of the sonic sphere in South American cultures and the thesis that Amazonian animism was a more archaic ontology over a broader area of South America, this paper suggests that the geometric patterns at Toro Muerto, with which the figures of danzantes are juxtaposed, may have been representations of songs. An extension of this hypothesis is the suggestion that some of the more complex compositions consisting of danzantes and linear geometric motifs were graphic metaphors of transfer to the other world.

The aim of the article is to reframe speculation from being seen as synonymous with unacademic conjecture, or as a means for questioning consensus and established narratives, to becoming a productive practical engagement with the archaeological and responding to its intrinsic uncertainties. In the first part of the article, we offer a review of speculation in the history of archaeological reasoning. In the second part, we proceed to discussing ways of embracing the speculative mandate, referring back to our engagements with the art/archaeology project Ineligible and reflections on how to work with the unknowns and uncertainties of archaeology. In the third and last part, we conclude by making the case for fertilizing the archaeological potential nested in the empirical encounter, creating more inceptions than conclusions, fostering ambiguities, contradictions and new spaces of experiential inquiry. This leads us to suggest that—when working with the archaeological—speculation should be seen not only as a privilege, but also as an obligation, due to the inherent and inescapable uncertainties of the discipline. In other words, archaeology has been given a mandate for speculation through its material engagements.

Rebutting previous claims, the paper employs comparative stylistic analysis and palaeoenvironmental data to argue that Angara style rock art originated in the Mongolian Altai during the Upper Palaeolithic (13,000–10,300 bp) where it evolved in situ. Around 8200–7300 bp, drought forced the hunter-gatherers who created Angara style rock art to migrate to the Upper Yenisey and the Selenga and Angara basins. When drought impacted that area c. 7500–7000 bp, Kotoi (Ket) culture descendants sought refuge in the resource-rich Minusinsk Basin. On the Middle Yenisey River, Angara style rock art served as a mnemonic device that encoded the syncretism of proto Ket and Evenki cosmologies and beliefs resulting from their social alliance.

This article engages with certain peculiar finds and features that we have documented at former German WWII military camps in Finnish Lapland, with a particular emphasis on an excavated assemblage that has affinities to traditional ritual (sacrificial) practices. The relevant finds and features date from the post-war period, but they are meaningfully associated with WWII sites. We consider the possible connections of these finds and features to folk magic and the supernatural, especially with regard to boundaries and boundary-making. The material is interpreted in relation to the painful histories and memories of WWII in the high North, and in the broader context of northern ways of life and being and perceptions of temporally layered landscapes. More specifically, we focus on how locals have coped with the difficult and haunting presences of WWII in northern landscapes and mindscapes after the war in a particular natural, cultural and cosmological lived environment which people have long co-inhabited with various non-human and spiritual entities. We aim to contribute to the broader discussion of the folklore of WWII as a dimension in conflict heritage and memory.

This article offers a comprehensive survey of figurative finds from Neolithic northern Europe. The survey shows that the immediate absence of figurative representation in the region is real and that the almost complete lack of figuration stands out from the previous Mesolithic and the contemporary northern and northeastern European Neolithic hunter-gatherer groups. Furthermore, the absence of figurative representations contrasts strongly with the thousands of clay figurines that characterize the southeastern European and Anatolian Neolithic. The survey provides a well-documented basis for discussing the significant differences between a figurative southeastern European Neolithic and an imageless northwestern European Neolithic. We suggest that the absence of figurative representations indicates that severe socio-cultural and religious/ideological changes took place within the Neolithic communities as agriculture spread from southeastern Europe via central Europe to northern and western Europe.

The majority of excavated human remains from Neolithic Britain emanate from monumental sites. However, it is increasingly recognized that multiple funerary practices are often attested within these monuments, and that diverse treatment of the dead is evident contemporaneously at non-monumental sites. In this paper, we highlight such variation in non-monumental funerary practices in Neolithic Britain (c. 4000–2500 bc) through the biographical study of an assemblage from a large post-hole at Bridlington Boulevard, Yorkshire. Through osteological and taphonomic analysis of the human bones and technological and microwear analysis of the accompanying axehead, we infer complex funerary processes, with the expediently manufactured axehead potentially featuring in the funerary rites and subsequent post-raising before being deposited in the feature. Bridlington Boulevard represents one element of a varied funerary complex—cremations in pits and post-holes—at a time when most individuals were not deposited in monuments, or indeed were not deposited at all. Compiling these non-monumental cremations across Britain causes us to look beyond categorizing these assemblages as funerary contexts, and instead suggests important cosmological associations and forces were brought together in pit and post-and-human cremation deposits.

Representations of wounded animals and humans in European Upper Palaeolithic art have traditionally been conceived as figures related to the hunting activities of hunter-gatherer societies. In this paper, we propose an analysis of Franco-Cantabrian figurative representations showing signs of violence between 35,000 and 13,000 cal. bp to qualify the interpretations of hunting and death in Palaeolithic art. To this end, both multivariate statistical analyses and hypothesis tests have been used to highlight the formal, thematic, chronological and regional similarities and differences in these types of artistic representations. The results show that wounded graphic units are mythograms coded by different variables that do not seem to reflect the actual hunting of the animal, but rather a more complex meaning. It was also discovered that, in early times, the artist preferred to wound secondary or less frequent animals, like deer. This changed in more recent times, when the main animals, such as bison, are wounded under greater normativity and homogeneity in the Pyrenees or the Cantabrian region.

This paper presents an approach to the study of European Iron Age ethnicity, a core topic for several decades which has begun to lose interest in the last years. A review of some of the uncertainties involved in the archaeology of ethnicity, focused on several key issues, is proposed. Moreover, some relevant topics that are usually undermined are suggested in order to address new challenges in the discipline: the introduction of political identity as a major focus of study, the reassessment of the etic perspective as an inner part of processes of collective differentiation, or the need for a holistic approach to join and combine different forms of expression. Finally, these approaches will be explored in a case study based on the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. This region has been chosen because of the feasibility of combining the results of different studies about social and political organizsation with relevant textual evidence to extract information about their ethnic dynamics.

Scholars of the past frame the ‘origins’ or evolution of inequality, usually using archaeological or anthropological evidence as a basis for their arguments, as an intentional, inevitable, important step towards the development of states, implicitly framed as the pinnacle of human political and economic achievement. Anarchist archaeologies reject the idea of hierarchy as a positive or inevitable evolutionary outcome underlying the path to civilization. We argue instead for a radical reorientation towards archaeologies of equality. We propose a prefigurative archaeology that celebrates the myriad ways that human beings have actively undermined and resisted hierarchical social arrangements. We aim to reorient archaeology's focus towards societies that purposefully prevented or constrained the emergence of inequality. To demonstrate the potential of archaeologies of equality we present case examples from Oceania, Britain, West Asia and the American Southwest. Highlighting the accomplishments of societies of equals in the past demonstrates the contingency and problematic nature of present forms of inequality. It allows us to explore a different set of pasts and thus enact different presents as we imagine different futures.

Around 120 years ago, a burial was discovered in the Argaric settlement of San Antón, 60 km southeast of Alicante (Spain). Although it was similar to many others recorded during more than a century of research, some gold objects found made this burial exceptional in the Iberian Bronze Age funerary record. Based on the most recent archaeological data, this article reviews both the context and the whole set of grave goods. It also explores the intersocial relationships that these gold ornaments suggest, which directly or indirectly seem to point towards both eastern Mediterranean Europe as well as to the Carpathian Basin.

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.