Through an examination of land use during the late Holocene, this article explores the changing nature of place and identity in what is today Djungan country (NE Australia). We begin with the notion that use of place is mediated by historically positioned systems of meaning. We further contend that through praxis (as social practice), experience of place participates in the structuring and construction of identity. By examining changes in the way a distinctive mountain — Ngarrabullgan (Mt Midligan) — has been incorporated within the broader socio-cultural landscape through time, we conclude that major alterations took place in peoples’ relations to their surroundings, and by implication in the construction of landscapes, life experiences and identity, around the fourteenth century AD. This has implications for the way we project ethnographic details, attuned to Dreaming-based ontological views of the world, into the more distant past.

On the assumption that Magdalenian mobiliary art is the bearer of certain technical traditions which express cognitive and cultural values, research is directed towards the identification and appreciation of these values through the understanding of techniques involved in bone engraving. Examination of a set of 90 objects from sites in southwest France sheds light on repeated artistic activity and graphic ‘recipes’ which do not appear to be characteristic of local or regional groups. In the sequence of actions as well as in their final product, there is no activity specific to the Ariège as opposed to the Gironde. Magdalenian artists have identical shared artistic procedures.

It is useful to view ceramic figurines from the Early Formative site of Paso de la Amada, Mexico, as both representations and products. That analysis links changes in a tradition of small, solid figurines to the rise of a novel social discourse concerning the elaboration and beautification of the human body. An increasing symbolic emphasis on the body may have been an important backdrop to the emergence of chiefly ideologies in the region.

Quartz, the most common mineral on earth, is almost universally associated with shamans. Why this ritual association occurred worldwide has remained unexplained scientifically, at least in part because western scientific thinking assumes that religious beliefs and practices are epiphenomenal and not worthy of study. This association is archaeologi-cally evident at Sally's Rocksheiter, a small rock engraving-vision quest site in the Mojave Desert, where quartz rocks were placed as offerings in cracks around the rock art panel. SEM and electron microprobe foreign materials analyses of Mojave rock engravings show that the association between quartz and rock art was common: almost 65 per cent contained remnants of quartz hammerstones, used to peck the motifs. A combination of ethnohistory and physical sciences explains why quartz, shamans and vision questing were so strongly associated: triboluminescence causes quartz to glow when struck or abraded, which was believed a visible manifestation of supernatural power. Recognition that this belief and behavioural association were based on quartz's physical properties aids our ability to identify the antiquity of the vision quest in the far west, suggesting that Mojave Desert shamanism is the oldest continuously practiced religious tradition so far identified in the world.

The days are long gone when archaeologists would automatically interpret any major prehistoric monument as evidence of a hierarchically organized society. Faced with a Stonehenge or a Silbury Hill, the evident deployment of large labour forces might naturally lead to thoughts of social élites and stratified societies. The task facing archaeologists today, however, is to interpret such monuments not as programmatic products of parallel social processes but as elements in unique and dynamic configurations of social, political and ideological interactions. This is the approach which the present volume seeks to exemplify, taking as its focus the famous site of Cahokia in the Mississippi valley. Cahokia itself is the greatest monument complex of prehistoric North America, marked by 120 mounds spread over an area of 13 square kilometres across the Mississippi river from the modern city of St Louis. During the twelfth century AD this was a settlement with a population estimated to have numbered in the thousands if not tens of thousands. What does such a phenomenon represent in social and political terms?

In this book, Thomas Emerson considers not just the monuments of Cahokia themselves but the evidence for ideology and the power relationships which might have supported a hierarchical society, and the mechanisms which may have connected Cahokia with its rural hinterland. The wealth of detailed information available from the sites in and around Cahokia — some of them excavated by Emerson himself — allows a detailed analysis at a level which is rarely possible in archaeological cases of this kind. Drawing on concepts of individual agency, power and ideology as forces for social change, Emerson interprets the rise of Cahokia as the successful manipulation of ideology by élites, an ideology in which the subordinate layers of society are compelled to participate.

Emerson's study raises key questions about the rise and fall of complex societies, and the role of ideology and agency in that process. That these questions remain open to debate, the contributions to this review feature amply demonstrate. How hierarchical was Cahokia, how effective was élite ideology, and, above all, how can we go about analyzing this kind of question from the archaeological evidence? The results have a bearing on archaeological interpretation at the very broadest level.