The Paleolithic period encompasses the oldest material in the archaeological record and spans some three million years. Because of its antiquity, competition for the earliest evidence of behaviors or phenomena can be intense. Paleolithic archaeology has therefore been seen as having a competitive atmosphere that was often hostile to female practitioners. In addition, female archaeologists who choose to undertake the role of field director—one of the most visible and influential roles in Paleolithic archaeology—face significant hurdles such as sexism and impediments related to motherhood. In this article, we investigate whether the perception of male bias in Paleolithic archaeology is valid. To do this, we assessed the gender demographics of Paleolithic archaeologists in tenure-track positions in North American institutions, publication rates by gender for articles on the Paleolithic, and the gender of archaeologists identified as “experts” in human evolution documentaries aired on PBS from 1994 to 2023. We found that gender demographics in Paleolithic archaeology follow that of the larger field of archaeology, with a stark imbalance at the rank of full professor but increasing gender parity at the lower ranks. Men outpublish women in all five journals we studied, but there is a positive trend over time. In contrast, the percentage of women “experts” featured in documentaries on human evolution never rose above 23%, with very little change over time.

In the early nineteenth century, foreign explorers traveling throughout Mexico and Central America began documenting sites, structures, and monuments then unknown in the United States and Europe. These explorers depicted the ruins they encountered as deserted and lifeless and suggested that the passage of time had rendered them ineffective. This article challenges such a Western, Romantic understanding of Maya ruins. Drawing on ruination studies and the material turn, it argues instead that Maya ruins are affective, consequential, and shape human actions. To do so, the article briefly considers the utility of assemblage theory and Indigenous ontologies to archaeological interpretations of ruins. It then takes as a case study an intrasite sak-be at Punta Laguna, Yucatán, México, and interprets it as a kuxansum—an Indigenous Maya concept of a living rope of blood that, even when seemingly severed, continues to connect spaces, human and other-than-human entities, and various temporalities. This interpretation encourages scholars to question whether broken or seemingly abandoned ruins such as roads must always be interpreted as functionally obsolete or whether new meanings are often made from the old.

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.

Fossils and more recent remains of dead organisms serve as natural archives of Earth’s recent and ancient history. It is often the case that small or fragmented specimens, especially microvertebrate bones, go unstudied. Accurate identification of such remains to a specific taxonomic level can help address a wide range of questions spanning paleontology, paleoecology, zooarchaeology, ecology, conservation science, forensics, and biogeography. Geometric morphometrics demonstrates significant potential for identifying fragmented lizard fossils to at least the family level based on shape differentiation. Our proof-of-concept study using lizard maxillae of extant species within the Pacific Northwest, USA, accurately identified fragmented maxillae with as few as six comparative specimens per genus. These findings establish a framework for addressing taxonomic challenges in fragmented bone specimen identification for taxa whose curated comparative specimens are small in number and unequal in representation.

This article considers people’s relations with ruins in the Mesoamerican past from the perspective of two approaches within the ontological turn. The first examines ruins drawing on Indigenous ontologies, while the second involves the application of a new materialist perspective that incorporates Peircean semiotics. Both approaches view matter as animate and share a relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing position. Research drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of Native American perspectives considers ruins as living entities often inhabited by divinities, ancestors, or pre-Sunrise beings, which could require propitiation and reverence or provoke denigration and erasure. A new materialist perspective allows archaeologists to better recognize what ruins did beyond holding meanings imposed on them by people. Ruins in ancient Mesoamerica had the vibrancy and power to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead in ways that constituted community and temporality, contested or legitimated authority, and invoked the cosmic creation.

This article revisits the editorial history of the Babylonian (Akkadian) version of the Bīsotūn (Behistun) Inscription (DB) to establish the extent of the surviving text in light of a re-examination of the inscription at Mount Bīsotūn (Behistun). Questions arising about the reliability of the standard edition presented in Von Voigtlander (1978) prompted a critical review of her new readings, which significantly expand the text by approximately two-thirds compared to what previous commentators recorded and what is visible on the rock face today. The article focuses on the results of this scrutiny, supported by information from Von Voigtlander’s correspondence with George G. Cameron and Matthew W. Stolper, highlighting the implications of their discussions.

In recent decades, numerous excavations have been conducted at prehistoric sites in northwestern Iran, and the results of these studies have contributed to the development of a chronological framework for the region. The early Chalcolithic period in this area is referred to as the Dalma or Hasanlu X period. Various theories have been proposed regarding the chronological span of this culture, yet challenges and debates about its dating remain. The Belachak 3 site is one of the settlements attributed to this period, excavated by the first author of this article. The excavation results indicate that the site was temporarily occupied. The pottery recovered from this site closely resembles the ceramics found at well-known Dalma sites such as Dalma Tepe and Nad Ali Beig. This article aims first to explore the relative and absolute chronology of the Belachak 3 site. Subsequently, it evaluates the dating of this culture based on the absolute chronology of this and other Chalcolithic sites in western and northwestern Iran. For dating Belachak 3, five animal bones were sent to the Poznań Radiocarbon Laboratory. The results indicate that the site was occupied around 5000–4700 BCE. Additionally, based on the pottery findings and absolute dating, it can be suggested that the Dalma culture likely emerged in the late 6th millennium BCE and became widespread across large areas of western and northwestern Iran from around 5000 BCE onward.

Carbon occurs as organic and inorganic matter in numerous complex forms and mixtures. Thermal separation of sample mixtures (e.g. sediment or soil), coupled with radiocarbon analysis, is a valuable approach for investigating the source, residence time, or age of different carbon components. At the NEIF Radiocarbon Laboratory we have built equipment for thermally separating samples for radiocarbon analysis using ramped oxidation. The original instrumentation has been successfully tested and validated for the purpose of partitioning samples based on their temperature of thermal decomposition, and for reliable radiocarbon measurement of different sample components. However, the original configuration of our instrument has limitations; a single analysis takes 2–3 hours, and an operator must be present to manually isolate samples from the required temperature ranges. To address this, we have upgraded our ramped oxidation equipment to include computer-controlled solenoid valves. These are activated according to a user-defined sampling scheme which enables autonomous collection of thermally partitioned samples. Here, we describe the latest improvements and present thermograms showing compatibility with the previous version of our equipment. This includes measurements of the radiocarbon background of the equipment, and results for known 14C-content radiocarbon standards. These demonstrate the reliability of the new configuration of our equipment for radiocarbon measurements.

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.

Luminescence dating and profiling are important analytical methods for providing chronological constraints and reconstructing depositional histories from sediment cores. However, sediment cores have often been exposed to ionising radiation sources during geophysical analyses, which potentially contaminates natural luminescence signals and may compromise the accuracy and reliability of luminescence analyses. Variable water content down-core is another potential issue for the rapid analysis of sediments, as water attenuates luminescence and may limit the comparability of samples. Here, we use a portable optically stimulated luminescence reader to test the influence of two common geophysical analyses—X-radiography and gamma-ray logging—on the luminescence properties of sediments in marine cores. We demonstrate that both techniques cause negligible changes to luminescence signals with doses <100 mGy. We test the effect of variable water content on luminescence and show that net signals are reduced by up to 70% at 30% moisture, relative to dry sediments. Accurate and reliable luminescence signals can be obtained from sediment cores despite prior exposure to ionising radiation from geophysical loggers or variable water content. However, the accuracy of luminescence measurements does require taking appropriate steps before analysis, like assessing the doses given by geophysical instruments at specific laboratories or drying samples.

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.

The Salapunku archaeological site is located within the Historic Sanctuary – National Archaeological Park of Machu Picchu (HS-NAPM) in the Cusco area of Peru. Although Salapunku is related to the Inca settlements of the HS-NAPM, during archaeological excavations, we distinguished different moments of cultural occupation from the earliest human presence to complex pre-Hispanic societies such as the Inca and finally to the colonial period. Previous research on the site’s chronology was based on typological analyses of pottery and other artifacts found during archaeological research. This radiocarbon analysis, the first of its kind in this area, establishes a chronology of the cultural history of this significant settlement, considered the gateway to the Cordillera of Vilcabamba.

This article presents the methodological reflections of two anthropological studies in Oaxaca, the Guiengola Archaeological Project and the San Carlos Yautepec Ethnographic Landscape Project. Both projects emphasize not only the involvement of local people, descendant communities, or both in archaeological work as temporary workers or spectators of the research results but more importantly as active participants in development of the archaeological research design. This includes involvement in such processes as the proposal of and reflection on an anthropological study, the formulation of relevant questions, ontological considerations when interpreting the results, and participation in dissemination tasks after these studies are concluded. Involving people from local and descendant communities does not detract from the scientific nature of anthropological work but instead results in much richer data, as the mapping of the archaeological city of Guiengola and the analysis of pre-highway pedestrian mobility patterns in Oaxaca in the past demonstrate.