In the Roman imperial worldview, masculine, civilized Rome saw a duty to control and care for uncivilized, feminine foreigners—a gendered power dynamic shared by more recent colonizing states as well. However, it is a methodological challenge to catch sight of the way such a worldview may have impacted colonial subjects. I examine the impact in Roman Britain and Gaul by applying a symbolic anthropological approach to a well-suited body of evidence, votive offerings: widely accessible and highly individual, each represents a single symbolic act. Taking up archaeological questions of material symbolism, I analyse the confluence of gender and offering material categories. Analysis of objects men and women offered at 10 sanctuaries in Britain and Gaul, and of the materials in which men and women were portrayed, reveals a permeability–impermeability binary: women are associated with breakable clay, porous bone and translucent glass, and men with strong, durable metal. This binary reflects Roman understandings of femininity and masculinity, shedding light on the fraught relationship between colonial rule and gendered understandings of the world.

The East African coast has long been recognized as a cosmopolitan region, where different cultures and peoples met and exchanged ideas, goods and knowledge. The culture that developed there from the seventh century ce was shaped by these relations, often referred to under the term Swahili, and many of the coastal residents engaged in Islamic practice, long-distance trade, conspicuous consumption of valued goods, and spoke a common language. This paper investigates the presence of slaves and migrants from the East African interior, through pottery assemblages uncovered at two eleventh- to fifteenth-century ce sites in northern Zanzibar: Tumbatu and Mkokotoni. These are groups of people not usually discussed in relation to medieval Swahili towns, and slavery has been especially difficult to study archaeologically on the coast. Through a material culture of difference, I argue that enslaved and non-elite migrants can be recognized and allow for a fuller understanding of socio-economic and cultural complexity in Swahili towns.

In the Sámi worldview, reindeer herders perceive the herd as a social unit consisting of individuals who vary in characteristics and social roles. Age, sex, physical appearance, personality and other social roles are acknowledged and recognized by the herders, who maintain their relationships with animals in different ways within herding tasks. Archaeological data, too, show that ancient reindeer herders were in contact with different kinds of reindeer, including wild reindeer, working reindeer and ‘ordinary’ herd reindeer. This paper uses zooarchaeological and ethnoarchaeological perspectives to examine the variety of life on the hoof at two fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Sámi sites in northern Finland. Archaeological data and zooarchaeological analyses will be used to assess hunting and herding practices as well as the characteristics of herd structure. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to examine critically and characterize the variety of the relations prevailing between reindeer and ancient Sámi herders, thus contributing both to the study of culturally specific ontologies and the analytical possibilities of archaeological research to understand such ontologies.

What happens to material knowledges and practices in the aftermath of involuntary uproot and relocation? How do displaced newcomers weave their lifeworlds, knowledges and practices into a novel context in the early stages after arrival? Anchored in a contemporary prism case in Zimbabwe, this archaeological study employs a temporally layered approach to displaced communities in southern Africa experiencing intense mobility in a dense political landscape with one or more dominant political entities. Extending the temporal scope and analytical relevance back to at least the early nineteenth century ce, our primary aim is to understand craftspeople’s practical problem-solving when coping with loss and absence while seeking to re-weave their social webs. The case examples share a common focus on earth materials (mud, soil, clay), stone and wood—easily available, low-cost or cost-free materials frequently used by displaced and refugee communities. Key analytical concepts are epistemic encounters, social memory, resistance and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics. The approach seeks to merge two domains that are rarely combined: craftspeople’s engagements with their socio-ecological landscapes and the relevance of ancestral commemoration.

From the fifth century onward, the creation of monumental ‘Big’ Buddhas (dafo 大佛), carved from living rock, became a significant cultural and religious phenomenon across Asia. This paper takes the Sichuan Basin as a case study, given its high concentration of rock-carved religious (RCR) sites. Notably, the number of monumental Buddha sculptures in the region increased significantly between 700 and 1200 ce. This paper examines the extent to which the construction of these Big Buddhas represents the appropriation of Buddhist RCR sites by non-local political and religious elites as a form of social control, and it is herein proposed that these social and religious elites commissioned and maintained such projects to reinforce authority and integrate local religious practices into institutional Buddhism. Since the construction of Big Buddhas required vast resources, labour and coordination, this paper examines those Big Buddhas which were left unfinished in order to understand the criteria for both success and failure, while also considering how these sculptures, as acts of social appropriation, mediated between the mundane and the divine, the imperial periphery and the centre, functioning as both spiritual symbols and political instruments.

An enduring challenge for the human evolutionary sciences is to integrate the palaeoanthropological record of human evolution and speciation with the archaeological record of change and differentiation in hominin lifeways. The simplest hypothesis, and therefore an attractive hypothesis, is that change is made possible by, and reflects, evolutionary change in the capacity of individual humans. The very long-term trend of increasing diversity and sophistication of technical and social lifeways (albeit with noise and periods of stasis) reflects long-term trends of increasing cognitive capacity linked to bipedality, followed by body size increase, encephalization and slow life history. We suggest instead that the long-term trend sees a gradual decoupling of human lifeways from the intrinsic capacities of individual people. We develop this view through an analysis of the Middle Stone Age and behavioural modernity, arguing that these depend on mosaics of social and individual factors, none clearly connected to specific evolved changes in individual humans.

This study offers a review of the artistic dimension of the Chinchorro culture, a complex hunter-gatherer society along the coast of the Atacama Desert that, around 7000 years ago, created elaborate representations of the dead. It provides archaeological background and investigates the possible reasons for the development of artificial mummification. Drawing on the art therapy model and the concepts of art and grief, the analysis interprets Chinchorro mortuary rituals as expressions of emotional and social processes. This study argues that these anthropogenically prepared mummies represent artistic expressions that reflect the intentional decision-making and emotional awareness of these ancient communities, serving as a means to process grief. Furthermore, the paper highlights the multifaceted nature of Chinchorro society, including the mining and use of pigments such as manganese—materials that, while symbolically meaningful, posed serious health risks and may have contributed to the eventual decline of their elaborate funerary practices. Finally, the study underscores the enduring cultural significance of the Chinchorro, particularly in shaping contemporary identity of Arica region, where artistic portrayal of dead links ancient and modern narratives of cultural heritage.

In this paper, I use examples from the Roman past and the Brexit present of the UK to discuss the links between practices, identities and the changing dimensions of imperial power. In both the traditional archaeological context of later Roman Britain and in excavating the roots of Brexit in post-War British politics, analysis of the practical semiotics of identity is the most fruitful way to understand the social processes under way. In each context, the meaning of different practices, articulated through the concepts of identities and boundaries, is crucial to the structuration of, respectively, a late imperial and a post-imperial society. The tensions between imperial and local identities are manifest across a wide suite of practices, the investigation of which provides a dynamic method for understanding how these tensions play out, with consequences for the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, on the one hand, and of the UK, on the other.

With this paper, we aim to bring the history of the rural landscapes and communities of the ancient (‘Classical’) Mediterranean back into the limelight, drawing attention to their contributions to and pivotal roles within the multifaceted structural transformations of the Mediterranean in the first millennium bce. To do so, we focus on two case studies from one particular region that looms large amongst those heavily exploited by ancient colonial powers: the island of Sardinia. In chronological terms, our focus is on the so-called Punic and Roman periods, roughly spanning between the fifth century bce and the fifth century ce. Long overlooked, if not outright dismissed, in conventional accounts of the ancient Mediterranean, the rural communities of Punic-Roman Sardinia were not only vital economic producers, but also formed large and culturally distinct social groups. They actively maintained their own traditions, ways of living and practices in the face of the ruling classes’ disruptive initiatives. Their actions to shape their identity and history resonate closely with the theory of the ‘history of subaltern groups’ formulated in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, particularly Notebook 25. We draw upon a semiotic understanding of Gramsci’s notion of subalternity to strengthen archaeology’s ability to foreground the materiality of those communities unaccounted for by history. Our goal is to discuss comparatively the material signs of rural life of Punic and Roman-period Sardinia, to outline an alternative decolonial perspective on the island and to consider its implications for the wider ancient Mediterranean.

How might the affective work of politics be accessed through the fragments of material culture that we recover as archaeologists? This paper considers how political identities can be formed and shaped affectively through engagement with the qualities of craft objects and the connected world of experience that they index. Taking up a case study from nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, I explore how political affects are caught up with the making and using of everyday things and how the transposed qualities of objects and the metonymic connections they evoke offer a means to tie changes in material culture to shifts in political affects over time.

Semioidentity refers to the sign–identity relationship in its pragmatic and metapragmatic dimensions. A component of social semiotic analysis, the study of semioidentity offers a distinctive contribution to archaeology by making explicit the different kinds of signs and their functions in the interpretive process. It privileges indexical signs as a means of anchoring interpretation and thus provides opportunities for additional higher-order claims about ideology and belief systems. A semiotic approach contributes to knowledge growth by positing that the most reliable interpretations—that is, those most likely to be true in the long term—are those that incorporate a variety of semiotic resources since their functions will act to constrain one another. In this essay, I discuss semiotic resources and semiotic ideology from the perspective of Peircean semiotics. I then offer a case study focusing on the archaeology of the Pueblo Revolt and the emergence of a pan-Pueblo historical consciousness to illustrate some of the rich insights that it affords.

Identity is a permanent integral feature of archaeological research. Even when it seems marginal to the current archaeological agenda, identity is brought back into the discussion by the urgency to engage with—often homogenizing—identity-based policies in contemporary politics. Lately, the emphasis placed on difference, fluidity and multivocality within archaeology has sensibly advanced the debate. Nevertheless, immutable identities continue to arise in studies of antiquity, replicating essentialist assumptions on the human past built around binary structures and simplistic equations of culture-historical reminiscence between material culture/practices and identities. The contributors to this special issue show how informing archaeological discourse with a semiotic methodology enhances the visibility of social dynamism, cultural complexities, among ancient human groups. This is particularly true for the communities silenced by history. These papers push the ontological and epistemological boundaries of archaeology by envisaging the archaeological record as a set of interconnected signs, whose cognitive potential overcomes the material space they occupy so that they become meaningful to different individuals and communities in diverse ways. Their stance maintains that semiotics holds the largely unexplored potential to enhance our understanding of the complexity of the past, ultimately offering a compelling standpoint to engage with contemporary identity-centred political debates.

Cognitive archaeology focuses on the mental processes behind human material culture, exploring the human mind for patterns of behavioural strategies and their corresponding material expression in artefacts. Sharing some of the aims and perspectives of cultural anthropology, cognitive archaeology has also been called ‘Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology’ (ECA) when it refers to hominin evolution. However, despite the abundance of publications and research projects that focus on ECA, this is a relatively new discipline, in which the earliest analyses were principally oriented to the appearance and evolution of language and symbolism. As there is no standardized method for investigating cognitive evolution, ECA researchers use multidisciplinary and wider theoretical models and methodological approaches. In this sense, partially because it is not unique to the genus Homo, stone toolmaking has been, and still is, an essential criterion for inferring hominids’ cognitive capacities. Aiming to contribute to ongoing discussions, this paper addresses and reviews some of the more relevant evolutionary cognitive approaches related to stone-tool manufacture in general and Acheulean technology in particular, aimed at building a synthesized chronological review of the discipline.

Northwestern Iberia was inhabited by communities whose only settlement model was the hillfort throughout the Iron Age. In archaeological terms, these people are included in the so-called ‘Castro Culture’. These communities experienced social and material changes at the end of the Iron Age. From the second century bc onwards, a more hierarchical and complex social system, together with a process of monumentalization and sophistication of the architecture of the settlements, was adopted. More specifically, in the region between the Douro and Miño rivers, a series of highly original subterranean constructions have been documented. Unique in the archaeological record of the European Iron Age, the function of sites has been much debated, with the most accepted use as steam bath. In this article, these buildings are analysed from a performative approach, to understand their meaning and function in the context of the landscape of the hillforts.

Panoramic accounts of long-term socio-political change tend to marginalize the role of animals. Taking a materialist stance, we re-evaluate the ways livestock shaped the emergence of the tributary mode of production out of a kinship-ordered mode of production. This explicitly Marxist analytical framework foregrounds the interplay between value, wealth, and labour, while attending to the economic specificities of livestock that make it particularly dynamic. Drawing on ethnohistorical data, we identify wealth in livestock as heritable, expandable, flexible, and convertible, while inherently unstable. We offer the first synthesis tying these qualities together and present a holistic picture of how these qualities can catalyse the class formation by promoting differential accumulation of wealth, economic growth, and direct appropriation of value from producers. These dynamics offer an animal-centric explanatory lens to view the long-term trajectory of northern Mesopotamia from the Neolithic through the Late Chalcolithic (9700-3500 BCE), where caprines, cattle, and pigs were central to the development of urbanism and states. While our analysis is specific to the social formations, species, and human-animal relations in northern Mesopotamia, the framework we present can be applied to contexts globally to better understand the animal side of political economic dynamics of early complex societies.

The capacity to relate a signal to an arbitrary, specific and generally understood meaning—symbolism—is an integral feature of human language. Here, we explore two aspects of knapping technology at the Acheulean site of Boxgrove that may suggest symbolic communication. Tranchet tips are a difficult handaxe form to create, but are unusually prevalent at Boxgrove. We use geometric morphometrics to show that despite tranchet flaking increasing planform irregularity, handaxes with tranchet tips have more standardized 3D shapes than those without. This challenging standardization suggests tranchet tips at Boxgrove were part of a normative prescription for a particular handaxe form. Boxgrove presents some of the thinnest handaxes in the Acheulean world. To replicate such thin bifaces involves the technique of turning-the-edge. Since this technique is visually and causally opaque it may not be possible to learn through observation or even pointing, instead requiring arbitrary referents to teach naïve knappers. We use scar ordering on handaxes to show a variety of instances of turning-the-edge in different depositional units at Boxgrove, indicating it was socially transmitted to multiple knappers. The presence of societally understood norms, coupled with a technique that requires specific referents to teach its salient features, suggests symbolism was a feature of hominin communication at Boxgrove 480,000 years ago.