In this paper we demonstrate how a concentrated mound of 8622 stone artefacts excavated at Walanjiwurru 1 rockshelter in Marra Country, northern Australia, reflects the emotional and spiritual dimensions of sweeping, and moral obligations to maintain Country. While archaeological studies have previously documented sweeping as part of site formation, and the social significance of stone in Australia is well established, few studies have examined how these practices intersect with Indigenous understandings of maintaining Country. Through analysis of stone artefacts combined with Marra knowledge, we demonstrate how sweeping activities 2500–300 cal. bp created a unique expression of ongoing relationships between people, materials and Country, maintained through the practice of sweeping. The mound’s composition shows distinctive patterns in both size distribution and stone type representation, most notably in the concentration of yellow quartzite—a stone type with particular cultural power due to its ancestral connections. These findings contribute to broader discussions about the integration of Indigenous and archaeological knowledge systems, while demonstrating how stone artefacts and sweeping practices remain active participants in maintaining relationships between Country, people and ancestors.

Native American worldviews suggest that humans create the world through story; storytelling is central in oral societies. Storytelling was embodied in artworks made at and disseminated from Cahokia, and it was also embodied in the landscape. Cosmological, goddess, and hero stories were told, but heroes depicted in Braden-style artworks found far from Cahokia suggest that the story of a Birdman wearing human-head earrings and braid was a charter myth at Cahokia. As the foundation of ideology and ritual, stories drew people to Cahokia, but the heroic epic was a new type of story critical to the spread of Cahokian ideologies.

The display of ancestral human remains in museums is a contentious ethical issue, raising concerns around the dignity and respect for ancestral lived lives versus the role of remains for education and scientific enquiry. Against the backdrop of recent debates sparked by the deinstallation of ancestral remains at several museums (e.g., the removal of the Shuar tsantsas at the Pitt Rivers Museum) and revisions of national and international ethics codes, this essay explores the role of two methodologies – a trial and interactive workshop – in producing inclusive spaces to support ethical decision making and practice. Digital participation technologies were used to support an accessible mode of participation that was anonymous – allowing attendees to express opinions about emotive and challenging subjects, such as ancestral human remains. For both examples, attendees and participants identified key priority and action areas for the sector and within their places of work. The activities will contribute to a wider research project that is investigating value and ethical disagreements and polarization within museums.

Between 2012 and 2014, a crew from the Pacbitun Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) excavated a small mound located on the western periphery of the Pacbitun site, a medium-sized ancient Maya center located in west-central Belize. That mound consisted of a thick deposit of granite sand and debitage, revealing a record of the production of several thousand granite tools dating to the Late Classic period. Since those excavations, a total of 22 similar mounds have been recorded, with 11 tested. All tested mounds reveal a similar material record representing periodically used working platforms where granite tools were shaped and finished during the Late Classic period. The recorded granite debris mounds are distributed over an area of 1 km2 some 500 m from Pacbitun’s core, an area that we suggest represents a community of attached, part-time specialists making granite tools on a seasonal basis. Given the scale of granite tool production, we suspect this community made tools not just for local consumption, but also for consumption outside of Pacbitun as part of a strategy to navigate the dynamic political Late Classic landscape of the Belize River Valley.

Regional survey of the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, Cayo, Belize by the Rio Frio Regional Archaeological Project has revealed an expansive, ancient Maya granitic-rock extraction and ground stone tool crafting industry distributed across an 11 km2 region. To date, 16 extraction-workshop sites of varying size and compositional complexity totaling 100 ha or 1 km2 have been identified through a combination of ground-based reconnaissance and aerial LiDAR survey. This article introduces the two largest recorded to date, Buffalo Hill Quarries and Moshy’s Hill. Discussing them, we present an overview of the common attributes of the Mountain Pine Ridge quarry workshops including types of extraction sites (quarry pits, strip mines, and cut faces), structural components (bedrock pits and erected blocks), cached tools (hammerstones and pics), and discarded products (half-loaf and full-loaf forms and metates) found at them. As the type of sites presented here are new to archaeology, the article concludes with a series of questions to guide future work.

While ethnographic observation has revealed nuances of ground stone production techniques and practical uses, there has been little theorizing about the archaeological exchange and movement of these goods or their deeper social meanings. In previous research, we obtained secure geochemical signatures for an ancient Maya ground stone tool assemblage by sourcing granite outcrops in Belize, enabling us to trace the provenience of certain archaeological assemblages. To understand the exchange mechanisms by which ground stone tools moved around the landscape, we explore three non-mutually exclusive models. We outline our expectations of material correlates for the archaeological record based on these exchange hypotheses and evaluate our assemblages against these expectations. This work helps broaden understandings of the organizational importance of ground stone tool production, exchange, and usage within ancient Maya society, critical first steps for investigating the socioeconomic dimensions of these tools.

This article outlines our research into granite use by the ancient Maya of the Alabama Townsite—a Late to Terminal Classic (ca. a.d. 700–900) rapid-growth community in East-Central Belize, part of the Eastern Maya Lowlands. One of our initial hypotheses regarding the seemingly sudden appearance of the town toward the end of the Late Classic period focused on granite as a staple resource exploited by its residents. We highlight current results of local geological surveys and related spatial, geochemical, and petrographic studies; preliminary analyses of surface-collected and excavated archaeological assemblages and architectural elements; and attempts at community-engaged experimental archaeology. We conclude that while ancient Alabamans did not extract granite as a staple resource for export, which could have fueled the community’s growth, they nonetheless valued granite in many ways, which we highlight in our discussion.

Research on ground stone tools has expanded exponentially over the years. Here, I present the context of the initial work on granite sourcing that connected archaeological sites in Guatemala to sources in Belize. I also attempt to put into perspective the subsequent research that has been carried out, much of which is reported and elaborated in this Compact Section.

Archaeological interest in analyses of ground stone tools (GST) was minimal until fairly recent times. Often these typically heavy artifacts were noted, but not collected as parts of archaeological assemblages. Most archaeologists did not recognize that GST were sometimes manufactured and could be considered in light of chaîne-opératoire lithic theory, in the same manner as their flaked-stone counterparts. The articles in this Compact Section are focused on a newly discovered granite ground stone quarry and manufacturing area in Belize. The subject is exceptional for two reasons: (1) granite ground stone quarries have not yet been studied elsewhere and (2) this is the first ground stone quarry to be discovered in Belize. The Mountain Pine Ridge batholith quarries are compared with previous quarry studies in the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, and Guatemala and suggestions made for future avenues of research in Belize.