There were differences in the representation of humans and animals between the regions of Thessaly and the central Balkans during the earlier Neolithic. These differences imply the constitution of distinct worlds. Representation is anthropocentric in Thessaly and it focuses on particular actions of the human body. In the central Balkans, there is more animal imagery, although here too humans predominate. The lack of specific traits suggests an ontological principle of generic identity.

The corpus of figurines from Çatalhöyük has attracted the attention of diverse audiences but there has been an overwhelming focus on a selection of female figurines, many of which lack exact provenience. Excavation from 1961 to 1965 yielded more mundane examples classifiable as anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and abbreviated forms. New work attempts to balance the picture through various methods and strategies. The research presented here collates the artefacts from these early seasons with those retrieved from 1993 to 2006 to gain a fuller understanding of figurine practice. The figurines almost exclusively represent secondary deposition. We can now assess the number and type of figurines deposited in buildings, middens, burials and elsewhere. Reassessment of the entire corpus has prompted interrogation of the category of ‘figurine’ and reconsideration of the taxonomies along with other artefacts and image production at Çatalhöyük. Depositional practices at the site suggest processes of mobility and circulation that have rarely been considered in studies of figurines. Typical ‘representational’ or aesthetic approaches imply that the figurines were a special category with particular values of religiosity and gender; but attention to the archaeological context can imply meaning from the material practices within which ‘figurines’ were enmeshed.

Whether Neanderthals were capable of behaviours commonly held to be the exclusive preserve of modern humans — such as abstract thought, language, forward planning, art, reverence of the dead, complex technology, etc. — has remained a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies since their discovery more than a hundred years ago. A lack of quantitative data on Neanderthal symbolism and complex behaviour is a key obstacle to the resolution of this question, with temporal analyses usually confined to single regions or short time periods. Here we present an approach to the issue of symbolism and complex behaviours among Neanderthals that examines the frequency of key proxies for symbolic and complex behaviours through time, including burials, modified raw materials, use of pigments, use of composite technology and body modification. Our analysis demonstrates that the number and diversity of complex Neanderthal behaviours increases between 160,000 and 40,000 years ago. Whether this pattern derives from preservation factors, the evolution of cognitive and behavioural complexity, cumulative learning, or population size is discussed. We take the view that it is not the apparent sophistication of a single specific item, nor the presence or absence of particular types in the archaeological record that is important. Instead, we believe that it is the overall abundance of artefacts and features indicative of complex behaviours within the Neanderthal archaeological record as a whole that should provide the mark of Neanderthal capabilities and cultural evolutionary potential.

In 2002, an investigation into the rock art of Waanyi country was undertaken in conjunction with ongoing archaeological excavation. Various subjects, styles and techniques were documented, associated oral history from Waanyi elders was recorded and the relationship to archaeological deposits was assessed. A large number of rainbow-like designs, in red or red-and-yellow, were recorded, along with a magnificent and very large red-and-yellow Rainbow Serpent. These and other images are discussed in relation to the travels of Ancestral Beings, stories and uses of coloured pigment and the use of local stone for both tools and the situating of important spiritual sites. Links to a network of other communities across northern and central Australia are highlighted. It is concluded that colour played a fundamental role in both expressing and maintaining relationships to places, Ancestral Beings and other groups of people. Important local differences can be seen in comparison to the ways in which colour has been used by Aboriginal people elsewhere. The research highlights ways in which the study of colour can prove valuable to archaeology globally.

Archaeologists who seek to examine people's roles in past societies have long assumed, consciously or unconsciously, the existence of individuals. In this study, we explore various concepts and dimensions of ‘the individual’, both ethnographic and archaeological. We show that many protagonists in the debate over the existence of ‘individuals’ in prehistory use the same ethnographic examples to argue their positions. These positions range from the claim that any suggestion of individuals prior to 500 years ago simply projects a construct of western modernity onto the past, to the view that individual identities are culturally specific social constructs, both past and present. Like most contributors to the debate, we too are sceptical of an unchanging humanity in the past, but we feel that thinking on the topic has become somewhat inflexible. As a counterpoint to this debate, therefore, we discuss Bourdieu's concept of habitus in association with Foucault's notion of power. We conclude that experiencing oneself as a living individual is part of human nature, and that archaeologists should reconsider the individual's social, spatial and ideological importance, as well as the existence of individual, embodied lives in prehistoric as well as historical contexts.

Mortuary practices of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Near East have been identified with skull cult and ancestor worship, as a means of creating and eliminating social boundaries. Artificial cranial modification is recognized as related to these practices, but its incidence is under-recognized and the precise nature of its significance is rarely discussed. In this study a skull, not previously reported as artificially modified, was reassessed by radiography to provide further insight on this subject. The cranial modification identified must have occurred in childhood but did not dramatically alter the cranium. We therefore argue that the post-mortem treatment of artificially modified skulls should be viewed in the context of ritual practices that were of significance during life, not just after death.

This article presents an experiment in time series analysis, specifically the Rayleigh Test, applied to the ancient Egyptian calendars of lucky and unlucky days recorded in papyri P. Cairo 86637, P. BM 10474 and P. Sallier IV. The Rayleigh Test is used to determine whether the lucky and unlucky days are distributed randomly within the year, or whether they exhibit periodicity. The results of the analysis show beyond doubt that some of the lucky days were distributed according to a lunar calendar. The cycles of the moon thus played an important role in the religious thinking of the Egyptians. Other periods found using the Rayleigh Test are connected to the civil calendar, the mythological symbolism of the twelfth hour of the day and possibly the period of variation of the star Algol.

Although archaeologists have become increasingly interested in disaster, collapse and regeneration, there has been insufficient attention paid to the social and psychological impact of disasters. Disasters can stimulate far-reaching religious changes. This article is a case study of the fall of the Middle Sicán polity of northern Peru (ad 900–1100) that draws on both archaeology and oral tradition. Middle Sicán cosmology was centred on the Sicán Deity, which did not survive the polity's collapse. The god's demise and the revitalization movement that followed the Middle Sicán can only be understood by considering both how many of the people of the region conceptualized their world and the disasters that occurred.

In the previous issue of CAJ, Heggarty (2007) set out how certain key principles and methods of historical linguistics can be exploited to open up another window on the past, from a perspective quite different and complementary to that offered by the archaeological record. Following this up, we turn here to an ideal case-study for exploring how the various patterns in linguistic (pre-)histories can be matched with their most plausible correlates in the archaeological data. Beyond our initial illustration of the Incas we now look further afield, to set the sequence of major civilizations of the Andes into its linguistic context, tracing the expansion trajectories of the main Andean language families further back in time, stage by stage, ultimately to their most plausible original homelands. The linguistic story emerges starkly at odds with assumptions widely held among archaeologists of the region. Indeed we encounter a paradigm case of how only a radical rethinking can reconcile our two disciplines' findings into a single, coherent, holistic prehistory for a human population — in the Andes, a prize now tantalizingly within our reach.

Franco-Cantabrian cave art continues to be the focus of much speculation but despite the many theories put forward there has been little progress in explaining the range of perplexing features of this ‘art’. Only by regarding such wide-ranging and anomalous characteristics as central to this debate might some progress as to derivation be possible. The account presented in this article will demonstrate how the many ‘contradictions’ prevailing might provide an important indication as to provenance that can be explained through an understanding of the shifting nature of visual imagery in the context of the everyday lives of Upper Palaeolithic communities. This will be based on the notion that the visual world as perceived can be disrupted by certain types of psychological effects that can be subsequently triggered by particular kinds of stimulus cues and evocative situations.

Archaeological excavations in 2002–3 at Hattab II Cave in northwestern Morocco revealed an undisturbed Late Palaeolithic Iberomaurusian human burial. This is the first Iberomaurusian inhumation discovered in the region. The skeleton is probably that of a male aged between 25 and 30 years. The individual shows a characteristic absence of the central upper incisors reported in other Iberomaurusian burials. Accompanying the burial are a stone core and a number of grave goods including bone points, a marine gastropod and a gazelle horn core. Thermoluminescence dating of a burnt stone artefact in association with the burial has provided an age of 8900?1100 bp. This is one of the youngest ages reported for the Iberomaurusian and raises questions about persistence of hunter-gatherer societies in the Maghreb and the potential for continuity in burial practices with the earliest Neolithic.

Time and change have been among the most widely discussed themes in archaeological theory, though they have varying fortunes in the vicissitudes of academic life. British and American anthropology, it has been observed, have long oscillated between history and evolution, between studying culture in its local context and in a long-term narrative. Following Steward and White rather than Kroeber and Boas, the New Archaeology's banner was evolution, and many of its theoretical goals were explicitly reductionist, for example, in viewing human actions as a local response to large-scale environmental conditions. Yet, at the same time, from its inception the New Archaeology also contained the seeds of a humanistic, historical approach (for instance, in tracing social stratification to chiefly power strategies to local, short-term political contexts).

This article examines the choices potters made while collecting and preparing their raw materials, forming, finishing and firing their pots in the Bronze Age villages of Kiszombor-Új-Élet (2600–2000 cal. bc) and Klárafalva-Hajdova (2000–1650 cal. bc) in present-day southeastern Hungary. Following the one-thousand-year-long ceramic tradition of these villagers, known archaeologically as members of the Maros group, I highlight choices that were shared by all, suggesting deeply engrained ideas about how Maros pots should be made, versus choices that were more restricted in distribution, suggesting a smaller group of potters, of greater skill and possibly greater status within the villages. I argue that, although pot making was one of many small-scale housekeeping tasks, the creation and use of pottery were integrally tied to expressions of status and identity, and that by the Late Maros Phase the identity of ‘potter’ was acknowledged by the community as distinct from other identities, such as those of ‘metalworker’, or ‘weaver’.

Cosmological models are common in Mayanist settlement studies. In such models, causeways are often said to follow various cosmological principles that are more or less the same from the Middle Formative to the present time. The models have been created by merging disparate data from ethnography, ethnohistory, iconography, epigraphy and archaeology into a single form where all the parts are determined by a common principle. The Terminal Classic triadic causeways at Ichmul, Yucatan, Mexico, could potentially be interpreted with such cosmological models. The evidence, however, does not fit these models. It is proposed, instead, with reference to the philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, that settlement studies should focus only on what is present at the site without reliance on transcendent concepts such as culture or cosmology. The triadic causeways at Ichmul are seen as virtual processes that have the potential to become actual forms at every present moment.

This paper re-examines the concept of the archaeological event as a means to avoid dual or multiple levels for historical phenomena, which a scalar view of time creates. Central to this procedure is an examination of the nature of residuality in relation to the archaeological record; it is argued that our concept of residuality needs to be broadened to encompass a more general view of material organization where the property of reversibility is foregrounded. In doing so, a different conception of the event is generated which defines itself not in terms of particularity but reversibility.

Archaeological investigations at three Formative period sites near San Martín Tilcajete in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, have recovered a sequence of temples. The temples span the period when the Zapotec state emerged with its capital at Monte Albán during the Late Monte Albán I phase (300–100 bc), coinciding with Monte Albán's conquest of neighbouring regions. Zapotec rituals of sanctification practised in pre-state times may have been affected by Monte Albán's military expansionism. The historically documented case of military expansion and political unification of the Hawaiian islands by the paramount, Kamehameha, shows similarities in the adoption of ideology and religious institutions. Among them are the establishment of standardized temples and the ascendance of a militaristic ideology and ritual order attuned to the early state rulers' coercive authority.

Generation after generation, life after life, human existence flows through time. Person to person, community to community, the relationships of social existence spread out in space. Archaeology has come up with many different approaches to the central questions of temporality and sociality, but it has not been very successful with either.

Recent breakthroughs in the cognitive and brain sciences, most importantly developments in neuroimaging technologies including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), event-related potential (ERP), and magnetoencephalography (MEG), have opened a new window on the human mind and offered a whole new set of possibilities for exploring its hidden functional architecture. This growing analytic potential can also be seen reflected in the numerous new fields of research, ranging from neuroethics and neuroprosthetics to the latest emerging field of neuroeconomics, which each year are being added to the rapidly expanding domain of contemporary cognitive and brain sciences. Despite these important developments however, within archaeology there has been little awareness of the challenging questions constantly arising from current findings in this field. With a few recent exceptions in the areas of cognitive archaeology and evolutionary neuroscience (e.g. Stout et al. 2000; Stout & Chaminade 2007; Dehaene et al. 2005; Frey 2003; 2004; 2008; Bruner 2003; 2004; Gibson 1993; Wynn & Coolidge 2003; 2004; Coolidge & Wynn 2004; 2005; Deacon 1997; Hodgson & Helvenston 2006; Mithen 2005), no systematic attempt has been made to channel this huge emerging potential in the direction of a common integrated research program targeting the big picture of human cognitive evolution (both before and most importantly after the socalled speciation phase) (but see Renfrew et al. 2008). Although archaeologists do not excavate neural tissue, we should bear in mind that the development of functional neuroimaging has allowed the investigation of a whole new set of questions which raise a host of archaeological and anthropological issues and thus demand our attention and critical evaluation.

One of the strengths of the archaeological discipline is our ability to examine social transformations over the course of centuries or millennia. However, we rarely think about the ways in which temporal scale affects our interpretations of these processes. Transformative social changes look different when seen from the perspective of the longue durée, a human lifespan, or a single day. Although they clearly result from human actions, long-term, major social changes cannot be understood simply as additive concatenations of short-term shifts.