Search

Large-scale archaeogenetic studies of people from prehistoric Europe tend to be broad in scope and difficult to resolve with local archaeologies. However, accompanying supplementary information often contains useful finer-scale information that is comprehensible without specific genetics expertise. Here, we show how undiscussed details provided in supplementary information of aDNA papers can provide crucial insight into patterns of ancestry change and genetic relatedness in the past by examining details relating to a >90 per cent shift in the genetic ancestry of populations who inhabited Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain (c. 2450–1600 bc). While this outcome was certainly influenced by movements of communities carrying novel ancestries into Britain from continental Europe, it was unlikely to have been a simple, rapid process, potentially taking up to 16 generations, during which time there is evidence for the synchronous persistence of groups largely descended from the Neolithic populations. Insofar as genetic relationships can be assumed to have had social meaning, identification of genetic relatives in cemeteries suggests paternal relationships were important, but there is substantial variability in how genetic ties were referenced and little evidence for strict patrilocality or female exogamy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans have been producing ‘art’ for at least 75,000 years. But the word ‘art’ is problematic when applied to archaeology. This paper explores the use of the concept of ‘visually complex object’ to designate a very specific kind of what is generally known as ‘art’. I argue for the application of this concept to the analysis of both the design of objects and their arrangement in cultural spaces, to gain new perspectives on social and political change in a prehistoric complex society. The focus here is on visually enchanting objects and changes in the ways that such objects were used and arranged in relation to larger changes in cultural circumstances. I contrast two visual orders in Iron Age Europe—the mid final millennium bc, when the visual order of ‘princely graves’ and the eye-fixing qualities of objects focused attention on the persons of individuals competing for leadership positions; and the second and final centuries bc, when a new visual order emerged to focus attention on large, publicly deployed objects that directed attention in open spaces to create collective experiences. The principles developed from these examples from late prehistoric Europe can be applied to changes in other complex societies worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The materiality of ritual performance is a growing focus for archaeologists. In Europe, collective ritual performance is expected to be highly structured and to leave behind a loud archaeological signature. In Australia and Papua New Guinea, ritual is highly structured; however, material signatures for performance are not always apparent, with ritual frequently bound up in the surrounding natural and cultural landscape. One way of assessing long-term ritual in this context is by using archaeology to historicize ethno-historical and ethnographic accounts. Examples of this in the Torres Strait region, islands between Papua New Guinea and mainland Australia, suggest that ritual activities were materially inscribed at kod sites (ceremonial men's meeting places) through distribution of clan fireplaces, mounds of stone/bone and shell. This paper examines the structure of Torres Strait ritual for a site ethnographically reputed to be the ancestral kod of the Mabuyag Islanders. Intra-site partitioning of ritual performance is interpreted using ethnography, rock art and the divergent distribution of surface and sub-surface materials (including microscopic analysis of dugong bone and lithic material) across the site. Finally, it discusses the materiality of ritual at a boundary zone between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea and the extent to which archaeology provides evidence for Islander negotiation through ceremony of external incursions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traditional accounts of animals in Mesolithic Northwest Europe have ultimately been economic in character, with a particular focus of the larger ungulate species that formed the dietary mainstay. Smaller mammalian species, regularly grouped as ‘fur-bearing’ species, also play a role in such accounts, as the source of important non-nutritional materials, namely their fur. However, how has placing these species in this broad category impacted archaeology's interpretation of their remains in the Mesolithic? This paper argues economic categorization of these species has led to an automatic interpretation of their remains, which may overlook evidence for other uses and treatments. This research proposes that the remains of ‘fur-bearing’ species were not just waste products from fur extraction, but were also wrapped up in complex and meaningful human-nonhuman relationships, which impacted how these remains were treated, and ultimately shaped the archaeological record. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about Bronze Age round barrows and the ways in which they became caught up in human practices over an extended time period. At one level it belongs to a flourishing body of work that examines the ‘re-use’ or ‘biography’ of prehistoric monuments. Rather than treating the latter as a generic group, however, this study focuses on chronologies of one specific monument type—round barrows—over a 2600-year period from 1500 bc–ac 1086. By bringing together evidence and interpretations generated mainly within period specialisms, significant homogeneities are revealed in terms of how activities at prehistoric monuments have previously been understood. The possibilities for seeking out different interpretative ground are duly explored. Using a case study from the east of England and drawing on evidence and ideas from much more broadly, the approach taken places particular emphasis on examining relationships between round barrows and other aspects of landscape. The findings offer fresh insight into the temporality of activities undertaken at round barrows, question existing characterizations of past people's historical understandings, and explore the long-term coherence of ‘round barrows’ as a category. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In preparing for the publication of the seven papers in the special supplement of Cambridge Archaeological Journal, we were concerned to find an outlet that could find a worldwide audience, as we believe that these papers have more than regional or period significance. That is a big claim. The case studies presented in the supplement are all of early Neolithic long barrows and long cairns of the fourth millennium cal. bc in southern England. Why should a study of the dating of constructions that held the remains of selected human dead, from a particular region of northwest Europe, at a particular point in the regional Neolithic sequence, have any wider importance? We offer two reasons. First, we are applying, perhaps for the first time to a group of monuments rather than to individual sites, a method for the interpretation of radiocarbon dates which enables much more precise estimates of chronology. Secondly, from this promise of far more robust and precise dating come many implications for the kinds of agents that we may wish to people our pasts, for the kinds of lives they lived, and for the histories that we can try to write about them. These are two developments, we suggest, which any archaeology needs to embrace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biographical approach has been applied to many studies of European prehistoric metalworking which frequently discuss the potential for recycling metalwork through melting to create new objects, drawing influence from the many ‘founders hoards’ known from across Europe. An agglomerate of half-molten bronze objects from Switzerland suggests that such recycling practices occurred there, although previous archaeometallurgical analysis has indicated that such practices were temporally limited. This article focuses on an alternative form of recycling — the direct conversion of one object into another through cutting and reshaping — observed on several razors from Late Bronze Age (LBA) lake-dwelling contexts in Switzerland. Atypical decorative motifs on these razors identify them as having been cut from arm- or leg-ring jewellery pieces. It is suggested that these ‘ring-razors’ were valued as individualized objects and created as personal mnemonic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is now generally accepted that there are no human societies which are truly egalitarian; this also true of bonobos and chimpanzees, among whom rank is inherited. If it were true of the common ancestor of Homo and Pan, there would have been (inherited) social inequality throughout our hominin ancestry. The problem is how to find it. It is also accepted that artefacts play an active and important role in our social lives; thus, socially defined differences may be reflected among the very simplest of artefacts. A case study of flaked stone from southwestern Egypt, dating to about 7000–8000 years ago, suggests that social differences can, indeed, be identified within very simple artefacts — in this case, plain, unmodified stone flakes. Using unmodified stone flakes, I explore the possibility of identifying not merely social difference but, specifically, inherited social difference in the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe and among early African hominins more than 2,000,000 years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the boundaries of clothing and the body in constructions of political identity in French colonial Louisiana. The study situates constructions of political identity among regulatory demands over the bodies of colonial subjects and the practices of taste and social distinction. It is argued that dress allowed colonial subjects to move into political spaces usually occupied by European colonizers. Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and visual data are used to investigate how French colonizers attempted to construct a body politic by regulating dress and the bodies of colonial subjects, while colonial ‘others’ attempted to constitute themselves as political bodies through self-fashioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Lewis-Williams is well-known in rock-art circles as the author of a series of articles drawing on ethnographic material and shamanism (notably connected with the San rock art of southern Africa) to gain new insights into the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe. Some 15 years ago, with Thomas Dowson, he proposed that Palaeolithic art owed its inspiration at least in part to trance experiences (altered states of consciousness) associated with shamanistic practices. Since that article appeared, the shamanistic hypothesis has both been widely adopted and developed in the study of different rock-art traditions, and has become the subject of lively and sometimes heated controversy. In the present volume, Lewis-Williams takes the argument further, and combines the shamanistic hypothesis with an interpretation of the development of human consciousness. He thus enters another contentious area of archaeological debate, seeking to understand west European cave art in the context of (and as a marker of) the new intellectual capacities of anatomically modern humans. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest west European cave art now place it contemporary with the demise of the Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, and cave art, along with carved or decorated portable items, appears to announce the arrival and denote the success of modern humans in this region. Lewis-Williams argues that such cave art would have been beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals, and that this kind of artistic ability is unique to anatomically modern humans. Furthermore, he concludes that the development of the new ability cannot have been the product of hundreds of thousands of years of gradual hominid evolution, but must have arisen much more abruptly, within the novel neurological structure of anatomically modern humans. The Mind in the Cave is thus the product of two hypotheses, both of them contentious — the shamanistic interpretation of west European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and the cognitive separation of modern humans and Neanderthals. But is it as simple as that? Was cave art the hallmark of a new cognitive ability and social consciousness that were beyond the reach of previous hominids? And is shamanism an outgrowth of the hard-wired structure of the modern human brain? We begin this Review Feature with a brief summary by David Lewis-Williams of the book''s principal arguments. There follows a series of comments addressing both the meaning of the west European cave art, and its wider relevance for the understanding of the Neanderthal/modern human transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]