This article attempts to clarify the nature and structure of the Nahua otherworlds. It follows in the footsteps of scholars who have demonstrated the inaccuracy of the Sahaguntine view of the Nahua destinations of the dead. The article begins by analyzing multiple Mesoamerican alphabetic and graphic accounts of journeys to the world beyond, and concludes that the Nahua divided their supernatural dimension into two parts, classified by the numbers eight and nine. “Eight” described a realm of communication with the gods, while “nine”—a realm of destruction and subsequent transformation into new life. Next, the article proposes that concepts such as Mictlan, Tlalocan, or Tonatiuh Ichan, traditionally understood as supernatural “regions,” were conceptual domains, each related to a particular space, time, gods, attributes, and potential actions. The article analyzes four of such domains, all related to the metamorphoses of Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: Tlillan Tlapallan, Tlahuizcalli, Itzmictlan, and Chiucnauhnepaniuhcan. This analysis not only leads to a new way of understanding the Nahua otherworlds as a whole. It also sheds light on the life cycle of the key Nahua god and his mysterious “destination,” Tlillan Tlapallan.

This provocation seeks to stimulate discussion by highlighting an alternative way of looking at the actions of destruction and creation, not as opposing forces but as an ongoing process of transformation. Destruction encompasses a variety of material and symbolic transformations, which go hand in hand with the creation of new possibilities. Therefore, destruction is not an antagonism to creation but – following Karen Barad’s agential realism – a mode of intra-active becoming. Far from being a theory in its own right, this paper presents a perspective that opens up the possibility of encountering archaeological discourses of destruction and creation from a posthumanist lens.

Long-term research at Waka’s City temple (Structure M13-1) demonstrates it was an important locale for ritual commemoration by local people as well as those from afar. Extensive and diversely constituted deposits throughout the building’s surface demonstrate it was venerated publicly by non-elites throughout Waka’s final occupations and gradual abandonment. Recent re-examinations of these materials confirm that they appear consistent with material assemblages from Waka’s domestic contexts. We can now also complement early insights that the building was important for Waka’s wider citizenry with deeper understanding of its earlier political significance and function; namely, that it formed a major component of the site’s political and ritual landscape for centuries, including playing a key role during the Early Classic Teotihuacan-Maya Entrada. Today the building’s fronting plaza continues as the locus for various pre-excavation ceremonies. Together, this paints a picture of a monumental center that remained vividly remembered for its political and ritual importance for centuries. In the context of the unifying theme of ruination studies and Indigenous perspectives on such landscapes, we consider this building to be an example of how landscapes remain animate and how memory is itself an animating force that sustains meaning and situates action.

When base metal coinage ceased arriving in the north-western Roman Provinces c. a.d. 400, no new currency was introduced. For their everyday exchanges, people may have turned to different practices, or materials, in cases where the still-circulating coins were perhaps not fulfilling demand. This paper examines an early fifth-century burial from the coastal fort at Oudenburg, Belgium. Among the male adornment in burial A-104, the purse assemblage filled with a number of coins and fragmented base metal items stands out. Was the scrap metal used for exchanges? The discussion of the coins and metal items, including their weights, reveals their possible economic functions, as well as the potential in further analysing late Roman and early medieval purse assemblages.

By using satellite images, this study confirms 350 km of ancient roads, comprising 634 wide and 321 narrow roads, in southwestern Amazonia’s earthwork-rich landscape. The roads were straight, mostly under 500 m long, but with some extending several kilometers. They occurred most prevalently in areas of dense earthwork. Nested earthworks were more road-rich than simple ones, and roads were more common in structures with quadrilateral rather than roundish shapes. Geoglyphs typically featured wide ceremonial roads with start widths ranging from 15 to 40 m, sometimes wider, and gradual narrowing toward their distal ends. Mound settlements had narrow, short roads pointing in various directions, which may have been for everyday travel. They also presented narrow but long roads leading to distant destinations, occasionally spanning many earthworks. When the endpoint was observable, 39.7% of roads led to a riverine environment indicating access, 10.6% connected to other earthworks reflecting integration, and 49.7% faded into currently open terrain. Many roads starting from geoglyphs aligned with the cardinal directions suggesting a possible awareness of astronomical alignments in the construction of the ditched ceremonial enclosures. This study confirms that ancient roads provide key insights into past civilizations and are essential to the region’s archaeological heritage.

Human sacrifice is one of the most dramatic and enduring rituals known to ancient societies. Death of the victim represents the climax of the event because lethal violence produces vivid images that articulate power relations between the organizers, audience, and those sacrificed. This study reconstructs burial treatments, biological profiles, and trauma patterns on 49 human sacrifices excavated from the site El Pollo located 13 km from Chan Chan, the capital city of the Chimú Empire (AD 1050/1100–1450), in the Moche Valley, Peru. Children and adolescents (n = 31/37) exhibit cutmarks to the anterior chest, which mirror the victim profiles and patterning of skeletal trauma documented at other Chimú sacrificial sites. Sacrifice at El Pollo also involved opening the chest cavities of adult males, dispatching bound male captives, and administering incisions to victim torsos to release blood. Given the administrative capacity and imperial enterprises of the Chimú Empire, these data indicate that sacrifice at El Pollo was part of a highly systematic ritual program staged throughout the Moche Valley and overseen by ruling elites at Chan Chan. This study provides evidence that sacrifice was modified to suit the civic-ceremonial needs of the empire and supported imperial efforts of militaristic expansion.

Biological determinism continues to shape how kinship is defined, from research to repatriation proceedings. This privileging of biological relatedness reflects and reinforces dominant ‘Western’ frameworks of kinship, often sidelining culturally-specific, Indigenous, and community-centered understandings of family and social belonging. Advances in archaeogenomic technologies today offer unprecedented insight into past human societies, and these advances have the potential to forge new, multivocal, and inclusive approaches to kinship. However, the application of ancient DNA risks reproducing power imbalances and epistemic hierarchies when genetic connections are assumed to be the primary or sole measure of social ties. This paper examines the conceptual and ethical implications of privileging DNA as a measure of kinship, emphasizing how such practices can obscure complex social realities, undermine self-determination, and reify narrow and essentialist understandings of identity. We call for critical reflection about the agents and motivations of archaeogenomics research, on the role of genetics in defining relationships and urge that multiple knowledge systems be considered in studies of kinship, both past and present.

In this commentary, I approach ‘kinship trouble’ as a cultural and medical anthropologist with two decades of ethnographic and collaborative engagement with genetics, and as someone deeply committed to and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, the collection’s significance is its focus on the emergent encounter between two very different fields—new kinship studies and palaeogenetics—both of which intersect with archaeology. Combining the intellectual explosion of new kinship studies with the data explosion of palaeogenetics is an enticing premise. What can happen, kinship trouble asks us, if the creativity that characterizes the new kinship studies could be married with the rich new layers of genomic information that have sedimented archaeological scholarship? And what could be lost if this opportunity is squandered? The contributions to this collection read archaeological and palaeogenetic evidence against the grain to reveal active kin-making practices that often disrupt presentist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions. These vibrant interpretations of relatedness provide many ‘carrots’ to entice anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists to become ‘oddkin’ and to ‘lean in’ to kinship trouble.

What is kinship trouble? When and where did it emerge? Why does it matter and how can we overcome it? These questions guide our discussion of kinship trouble, a term meant to capture the difficulties in reconstructing ancient kin relations, but also an attempt to resolve them through interdisciplinary collaboration and ethically adequate approaches. Motivated by the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and the urgency of working together to understand human diversity in the past and present, we reconsider kinship not only as a biological or genetic but also as a social phenomenon for the study of societies through archaeogenetic, archaeological, and socio-cultural anthropological approaches. As to the question of how kinship trouble could be overcome, we propose making more ‘oddkin’ (sensu Haraway) to bring disciplines into the conversation and foster unexpected collaborations around three themes: ethical collaboration, the integration of biological and social approaches, and kinship studies as acts of care and (non)mutuality of being.

This study investigates trends in the conceptualization, methods and analysis of kinship throughout the corpus of bioarchaeological research from the pre-Hispanic Andes in recent years (since 2000). Building on a summary of key shifts in archaeogenetics and definitions of foundational concepts like ayllu social organization and relationship kinship in the Indigenous Americas, the study carries out bibliometric analysis of four methods-based search strings. The resulting corpus (N=25 publications) is analysed for word frequency and correlation to understand how kinship analysis has changed through time, across cultures and contexts and according to methods used within bioarchaeology. Results show that explicit testing of kinship-related hypotheses has remained somewhat steady across aDNA, biodistance, cranial vault modification (CVM) and isotopic studies—especially for foundational bioarchaeology journals—and may be experiencing a resurgence. However, household and community levels of kinship were often excluded from study conceptualization and research questions. Results suggest isotopic analysis can augment archaeogenetic and morphometric approaches to understanding how common geography and substance consumption constitute kin groups. Collaborative, multi-correlate databases of archaeological individuals are proposed to advance kinship studies in Andean bioarchaeology.

This article draws on queer and feminist social anthropological epistemologies in order to sketch out a methodological framework for the interpretation of archaeological data from funerary contexts. Funerary assemblages have ongoing significance in archaeological models of identity and social structure, including one’s status, gender, cosmological beliefs, etc. Biomolecular analyses of human remains are a major source of data about the past and are increasingly used to reconstruct past social structures, especially where there is evidence of biological connection between individuals at a single funerary site. However, archaeological interpretation of these sites is complicated by their origin in social interactions, belief structures, and sometimes extended funerary rites, which themselves may have been adapted for a range of ritual, political and interpersonal needs. Here, we consider the funerary sphere as a site of ‘kin-work’, a concept from feminist anthropology that centres the everyday, habitual, and often overlooked material efforts of sustaining inter- and intra-generational familial relations. We argue that kinning practices form a key part of burial rites as the dead person or persons’ relationships are reconsidered, renegotiated, transformed, or manipulated. The goal is to develop a model of kin relations within funerary contexts in order to contribute to a more nuanced archaeology of social practice that complements emerging discussions of family structure, kinship and relatedness.