In July 2006 archaeologists from the University of Bristol and Atkins Heritage embarked on a contemporary archaeology project with a difference. We ‘excavated’ an old (1991) Ford Transit van, used by archaeologists and later by works and maintenance teams at the Ironbridge Museum. The object: to see what can be learnt from a very particular, common and characteristic type of contemporary place; to establish what archaeologists and archaeology can contribute to understanding the way society, and specifically we as archaeologists, use and inhabit these places; and to challenge and critique archaeologies of the contemporary past. In this report we describe our excavation and situate it within a wider debate about research practice in contemporary archaeology.

Communal ceremonial sites and social groups often share mutually reinforcing and structuring properties. As a result of this dynamic relationship, ceremonial sites and social groups exhibit ever-emergent properties as long-term works-in-progress. Ceremonial kod sites featuring shrines of trumpet shells and dugong bones were central to the communal ritual life of Torres Strait Islanders. Continuously formed over the generations by ritual additions, these shrines were linked to ongoing maintenance, legitimization and cohesion of totemic clans and moieties that formed the structural basis of island communities. As such, understanding the history of kod sites provides an opportunity to investigate the historical emergence of ethnographically-known social groups in Torres Strait. This mutual emergence is investigated archaeologically at the kod on Pulu islet which is owned and operated by the Goemulgal people of nearby Mabuyag island. Multiple radiocarbon dates from shell and bone shrines and an underlying village midden indicate that the kod, and by association the Goemulgal and their totemic clan and moiety system, emerged over the past 400 years. Aided by local oral history and ethnography, it is argued further that establishment of the kod saw the status of Pulu change from a residential to a ceremonial and sacred place.

The Classic Maya, like many peoples in the ancient world, paid keen attention to male youths as a key age/gender grade, and, in the Maya example, to those who would inherit a courtly world of privilege and domination. Detection of glyphic texts and images relevant to male youth reveals them to be a major interest of elite Classic society, participating in tribute, dances and battle. This transient status, marked by infancy and juvenility on one end, adulthood and ancestral status on the other, led to the production of drinking vessels and sundry goods owned by ‘great youths’, presumably those soon to marry or enter adulthood. Homosocial and homoerotic impulses conditioned male youth among the Classic Maya, if in ways that remain only faintly or intermittently visible. The probability nonetheless exists that this evidence represents a thin slice of Classic society, skewed by elite concerns with reproducing elite attributes across generations.

Extremely lavish funeral feasts are common and expensive in many village and chiefdom societies. Anthropologists and politicians often explain such apparently economically irrational expenditures in terms of culture values or traditions. However, viewed from the broader perspective of other types of promotional feasts in transegalitarian or more complex societies (including marriages and house feasts), overtly competitive funeral feasts are used to advertise the success of the surviving family and kin groups. This socioeconomic promotion is important for attracting powerful/successful/wealthy families as affines and allies. Such allies are critical for defending family and individual self-interests in village political and economic struggles that are endemic. Funerals are especially apt contexts for these displays and political manoeuvres.

It is proposed here that the archaeological evidence for the emergence of ‘modern behaviour’ (160,000–40,000 bp) can best be explained as the rise of cognitive variation within populations through social mechanisms for integrating ‘different minds’, rather than by the development of a single ‘modern human mind’. Autism and the autistic spectrum within human populations are used as an example of ‘different minds’ which when integrated within society can confer various selective benefits. It is proposed that social mechanisms for incorporating autistic difference are visible in the archaeological record and that these develop sporadically from 160,000 years bp in association with evidence for their consequences in terms of technological innovations, improved efficiency in technological and natural spheres and innovative thinking. Whilst other explanations for the emergence of modern human behaviour may also contribute to observed changes, it is argued that the incorporation of cognitive differences played a significant role in the technological, social and symbolic expression of ‘modern’ behaviour.

This article develops a novel method for assessing the cultural context of rock art, and applies it to the rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic of France and Spain. The article relies on a generative approach, assuming that artists have the potential to choose which motifs to select from the repertoire or vocabulary of their artistic system, but that appropriate choices at any place are guided by the location of that site within the culturally-mediated geography of the region. Ethnographic studies of rock art depicting animal species produced in the contexts of totemism, shamanism and everyday life are used as reference points in an analytical framework, which is then applied to a number of ancient traditions.

Experiments in replicating facsimiles of Late Neolithic engraved slate plaques from southwestern Iberia suggest that variation related to fine-motor skills is greater between individual engravers than within the work of a single engraver. This implies that the work of different individuals producing certain classes of material culture may be distinguishable on the basis of repetitive, idiosyncratic traits. These studies also generate otherwise unobtainable information about the experience of plaque making. We examine past and present methodological attempts to differentiate unconscious, individual styles from intentional, culturally mediated styles, and discuss why in some cases it is extremely difficult to separate such variation. We explore the link between individual variation and theoretical notions of the individual, and its implications for understanding the organization, transmission, and shared expression of ancient social practices.

This article explores the relationship between the making of things and the making of people at the Bronze Age tell at Százhalombatta, Hungary. Focusing on potters and potting, we explore how the performance of non-discursive knowledge was critical to the construction of social categories. Potters literally came into being as potters through repeated bodily enactment of potting skills. Potters also gained their identity in the social sphere through the connection between their potting performance and their audience. We trace degrees of skill in the ceramic record to reveal the material articulation of non-discursive knowledge and consider the ramifications of the differential acquisition of non-discursive knowledge for the expression of different kinds of potter's identities. The creation of potters as a social category was essential to the ongoing creation of specific forms of material culture. We examine the implications of altered potters' performances and the role of non-discursive knowledge in the construction of social models of the Bronze Age.

In the early days of anthropology, indigenous concepts of animating essences and the cross-cutting nature of the life-force, expressed in such terms as hau and mana, were front and centre in the ethnographic literature (e.g. Mauss 1954; 1975; Malinowski 1922; 1936; 1948). Branded as ‘mystical’, ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ for more than a generation, however, such potentially key conceptual sites of alterity have only recently begun to be revisited and recuperated within anthropology and in other fields such as material culture studies and cognitive sciences. The articles in this special issue of CAJ consider what archaeology might contribute to the general theoretical discussion on animism and alternative ontologies. As a set, they offer a diversity of perspectives on how the recognition of animism as a prevalent theme within contemporary indigenous worlds can affect archaeological analysis and interpretation. They also offer ideas about how attending to the significance of such concepts may provide new analytical purchase on alternative ontologies and ways of constructing, dissolving, or transforming traditional dichotomies that continue to powerfully shape our worlds.

The application of globalization theory to colonial contexts in recent years has emphasized articulations of the colonized and the colonizers. For the Mediterranean Iron Age, focus has been upon expressions of local (colonized) identities, and of regional variabilities of the overseas Greeks and Phoenicians; any attention to the engagements that the Greeks and Phoenicians had with one another during this time has been solely contrapositive in the framing of arguments. The present study examines the background to this circumstance before addressing specifically the engagement between these global cultures on a Mediterranean-wide scale during the period of their overseas foundations. Regarded from the perspective of a globalization framework, the common sets of practices and shared bodies of knowledge reveal a deep complexity of intercultural contact during the Iron Age, reminding us that cultures should never be considered in isolation.

Animists' theories of matter must be given equivalence at the level of theory if we are to understand adequately the nature of ontological difference in the past. The current model is of a natural ontological continuum that connects all cultures, grounding our culturally relativist worldviews in a common world. Indigenous peoples' worlds are thought of as fascinating but ultimately mistaken ways of knowing the world. We demonstrate how ontologically oriented theorists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold in conjuncture with an anti-representationalist methodology can provide the necessary conditions for alternative ontologies to emerge in archaeology. Anthropo-zoomorphic ‘body-pots’ from first-millennium ad northwest Argentina anticipate the possibility that matter was conceptualized as chronically unstable, inherently undifferentiated, and ultimately practice-dependent.

Cognitive neuroscience provides a powerful perspective on the brain and cognition from which archaeologists can begin to document the evolution of the human mind. The following essay uses the Hohlenstein-Stadel figurine as a starting point to demonstrate the two kinds of conclusion open to an evolutionary cognitive archaeology: first, describing features of the cognitive life-world at specific points in human evolution, in this case central Europe 32,000 years ago, and second identifying the evolutionary timing and contexts for specific cognitive abilities, in this case various components of concept formation. We argue that the abstract concept underpinning the Hohlenstein-Stadel figurine resulted initially from an effortful (attentive) linking of ‘animal’ and ‘person’ concepts via the working memory network of the frontal and parietal lobes. These ‘animal’ and ‘person’ concepts themselves were largely unconscious folk biological categories generated by a parietal network that had evolved earlier, probably by the time of the earliest Homo sapiens. These in turn rest on even older, basic ontological categories of ‘animate’ and ‘manipulable’ objects that are temporal lobe networks, and which evolved much earlier still, perhaps with the advent of Homo erectus.

Ethnohistoric sources suggest that the indigenous inhabitants of Andean South America saw both people and things as animated or enlivened by a common vital force (camaquen). In approaching the subject of camaquen archaeologically, I attempt to place objects and their materiality at the analytical centre, rather than the normally privileged ethnohistoric or ethnographic data, in order to see what new insights into the nature of Pre-Columbian ontologies might be gained from ‘thinking through things’. In this, I follow recent theories premised on the idea that the traditional segregation of concepts and things may hinder understanding of alternative worlds. The study focuses specifically on the arrangements, relationality and referentiality between and among objects found in sacred and offering contexts dating to the Inca period.

Stone tool-making is an ancient and prototypically human skill characterized by multiple levels of intentional organization. In a formal sense, it displays surprising similarities to the multi-level organization of human language. Recent functional brain imaging studies of stone tool-making similarly demonstrate overlap with neural circuits involved in language processing. These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that language and tool-making share key requirements for the construction of hierarchically structured action sequences and evolved together in a mutually reinforcing way.

This article argues that ritual behaviour was a critical selective force in the emergence of modern cognition. The argument is based on the following observations: (1) Upper Palaeolithic Cro-Magnons exhibited unprecedented levels of social complexity and there is evidence to suggest that this complexity may have begun even earlier in Africa, possibly connected with the Toba eruption. (2) Creating larger, more complex social arrangements, especially those that cut across traditional within-group boundaries, would have required more elaborate and demanding social rituals. (3) Ritual behaviour requiring focused attention and the inhibition of pre-potent responses places demands on areas of the brain known to be associated with working memory. (4) An enhancement of working-memory capacity was very likely necessary for the emergence of modern cognition. (5) The social rituals of traditional societies, which provide the best window on the social rituals of our ancestors, are highly demanding in terms of maintaining focused attention and inhibiting pre-potent responses. (6) Those of our ancestors best able to successfully engage in ritual behaviour would have accrued fitness advantages from increased access to resources, status enhancements and psychophysical health effects. (7) Larger working-memory capacity was very likely a characteristic of these more ritually-capable hominins.

In this review and position paper we explore the neural substrates for manual specialization and their possible connection with language and speech. We focus on two contrasting hypotheses of the origins of language and manual specialization: the language-first scenario and the tool-use-first scenario. Each one makes specific predictions about hand-use in non-human primates, as well as about the necessity of an association between speech adaptations and population-level right-handedness in the archaeological and fossil records. The concept of handedness is reformulated for archaeologists in terms of manual role specialization, using Guiard's model of asymmetric bimanual coordination. This focuses our attention on skilled bimanual tasks in which both upper limbs play complementary roles. We review work eliciting non-human primate hand preferences in co-ordinated bimanual tasks, and relevant archaeological data for estimating the presence or absence of a population-level bias to the right hand as the manipulator in extinct hominin species and in the early prehistory of our own species.

A major focus of inter-disciplinary debate has been the need to bridge the Cartesian divide between people as active subjects and inert passive objects, to better reflect how things provoke and resist human actions through their ‘secondary agency’. Many Central Andean people express a deep concern about their relationship with places and things, which they communicate with through daily work and rituals involving ‘sympathetic magic’. A consideration of Andean animism emphasizes how agency is located in the social relationship people have with the material world and how material objects can have social identities.

The shamanistic interpretation of hunter-gatherer rock arts has in recent years been heavily criticized. Much of this criticism draws on some of the same fundamental flaws in the shamanistic approach to understanding rock arts. In this article I briefly outline what it is about shamanism and its use in rock-art research that both sides of the debate have got wrong. Taking southern African hunter-gatherer rock art as a starting point, I demonstrate a new way of understanding rock art is indeed possible. I then explore the possibilities of this approach by examining rock art from the post Palaeolithic in Spain, and the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe.