The question of which African hominin taxon/taxa was responsible for producing Oldowan stone tools has persisted for nearly a century. Homo habilis, Paranthropus boisei, Homo erectus, Australopithecus garhi, and Australopithecus africanus, among others, have been proposed as candidates, but we have never had a definitive answer to ‘who made the Oldowan’. We review the hominin taxa that overlap temporally

Grounded in the archaeology of persistence, decolonial perspectives, and technological approaches to ceramic manufacture, this study examines pottery-making as both a material expression of resilience and a site of ongoing identity negotiation. Integrating notions of intersubjectivity and intercorporeality, this paper explores the interrelation between technical processes, embodied knowledge, and territorial

This paper presents the results of a study that investigates the settlement history of Mongolia’s desert-steppe to understand the role of foragers in the evolution of pastoralism. The study examines land use, mobility, technological organization, and environmental context prior to, during, and after the transition to food production (Neolithic-Kitan Periods, ca. 6050 BCE-1150 CE) to detect differences

Sustainable natural resource use and management is widely proposed as the solution to our current planetary ecological crises. However, there are multiple pathways to sustainability: consume fewer resources or modify the environment to be more productive. White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in 17th century New England provide an informative case study of the historical ecology of sustainable

North American archaeology is increasingly embracing the study of existing museum collections to fulfill longstanding ethical obligations to document curated materials and to avoid unnecessary excavation of archaeological sites. Working with collections from historic excavations in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, this article confronts some of the challenges of collections-based research and demonstrates

This paper is based on a theoretical perspective focused on the materiality of rock art: breaking away from the primacy of communication and representation in the archaeology of art, it proposes a set of concepts to approach the engagement of people with rock art via its techno-visual and performative qualities. These concepts are applied to a regional case study in Southern Mendoza (Central-West Argentina)

Ceramic molding is often addressed as a simple, repetitive, and standardized technique. Similarly, mold-making, though much less studied than molding itself, is frequently viewed as equally straightforward. Yet what specific gestures, techniques, and tools are involved in mold-making? Does internal technical variability exist behind apparent external standardization? What insights into ancient craft

For a century, Copper Age Iberia (c. 3200-2200 BCE) has been seen as a grand laboratory for discussions of early social complexity. And yet, most theories were, from an empirical view point, infra-determined, as evidence was limited and restricted to a few sites. This situation has changed, as the availability of high-quality scientific data for a broader spectrum of sites now provides opportunities

Migration and diffusion are universal phenomena that fell out of favor in American archaeology during the processulist turn. David Anthony’s 1990 defense spurred renewed interest in migration as a structured behavior worthy of serious analysis; yet we continue to dismiss diffusion as a nonexplanatory cultural force that is both difficult to identify in the material record and overemphasizes the roles

The discovery of Ebla in 1964 revolutionized our understanding of ancient Near Eastern civilizations, offering a unique glimpse into the sophisticated urban culture that flourished in the 3rd millennium BCE. Despite extensive research on Ebla’s administrative and cultural achievements, its culinary traditions have remained largely unexplored. This study seeks to fill this knowledge gap by reconstructing

This special issue explores the complex question: What does it mean to talk about identity in the context of subjects shaped by mobility, and what insights can archaeology provide that other fields may overlook? This inquiry lies at the heart of both archaeology and historical archaeology, which have long grappled with the diverse mobilities and identities reflected in the archaeological record. As

This article explores the material and social relations of Indian Ocean indentured laborers in post-emancipation Mauritius. Shifting away from traditional identity categories used in archaeology, I draw on queer and diasporic frameworks to examine shared consumption practices of indentured laborers who lived and worked at Bras d’Eau, a nineteenth-century sugar estate. Through the concepts of kala pani

The figure of the warrior occupies a key position in both scholarly and popular representations of the Viking Age. Despite this, many aspects of martial culture and lifeways during the period remain obscure. In order to address this issue, this article offers an exploration of the identities, roles, and social position of warrior groups in Viking-Age Scandinavia. We adopt a recently developed institutional

Interments of Ancestors linked past peoples with the living. However, less attention has been given to secondary burials and their role in social memory and placemaking. Given these ties between Ancestors, the living, and the landscape, Ancestors may have been brought when descendants moved from place to place. I applied biogeochemical methods to address questions about movement, placemaking, and ancestry

This article applies the concept of enactive signification to the subject of Early Cycladic figurines, critiquing the use of prestige frameworks for the interpretation of these objects and contributing to the archaeological analysis of the semiotics of value. I examine social organisation during the emergence of the Aegean Early Bronze Age and the material sign relations of Grotta-Pelos mortuary practices

The traditional practice of reindeer castration is an integral component of all known past and present reindeer herding cultures. It has likely played an essential role in the reindeer domestication process, making it relevant for understanding initial and subsequent human-reindeer interactions beyond hunter-prey relationships. This paper presents data on the Traditional Knowledge of reindeer castration

This study examines intra-settlement social inequality across 73 Mumun settlements (ca. 1500–1 BCE) on the southern Korean Peninsula using the Gini index and Lorenz curve. House size and pottery density are employed as proxies for socioeconomic power and the capacity for food storage and sharing, respectively. The analysis reveals a nuanced understanding of Mumun social complexity. Variations in house

Previous analysis of skeletal indicators of physical activity suggested that the population at Tombos, an Egyptian colonial town in Nubia, may have benefited from an imperial framework through occupations that were not physically demanding. With more than ten years of continued excavations, coupled with further biomolecular testing, we reanalyze entheseal changes at Tombos. We compare entheseal changes

This article presents the latest results of a collaborative project that seeks to develop recommendations for policymakers on migration by drawing upon the incomparable dataset accessible to archaeologists. While prior archaeological research on migration has provided important theoretical insights, our policy-oriented goals required us to adopt different terminology and analytical frameworks. How

Archaeological narratives of migrations in pre-Colonial North America rely on cultural materials, which often only convey relative temporalities and tempos of these dynamic events. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling to examine a pattern of immigration into a cultural frontier during the 14th through the 16th centuries AD in what is today southwest Virginia, USA. Incorporation of prior

Macroevolutionary analysis provides the opportunity to ask questions concerning the major patterns of long-term continuity and change in the cultural record. In this study, we address the evolution of lithic technological operational strategies spanning the last 20,000 years primarily in the northwestern and northern portions of North America. We measure systemic technological variation on a maximum

The archaeology of diaspora has grown in many directions during the first two decades of the 21st century. It has become a key way of understanding the short-term and long-term connections between people and communities defined by movement and migration. However, archaeologists of diaspora still at times struggle with old models of interpretation which seek out ethnic markers in material culture or

Architectural studies are of great interest in considering variations in social phenomena. This ethnoarchaeological program therefore focuses on the evolution of building techniques, both in relation to the recent prehistory of Western Asia, and the current context through field surveys carried out in Djibouti. The aim of this article is to present the results of our study conducted in the Gobaad basin

A set of visual representations and marks made on the red plastered floor within a domestic enclosure, are analyzed. They belong to low scale agro-pastoralist societies that inhabited the Argentine Puna in the South Central Andes, ca. 1500 BP. The prepared floor would have configured a proper surface for a multisensory ritual performance. This type of material is reserved for specific places such as

This article seeks to develop a formal framework for studying the American Jewish diaspora archaeologically, using Alexandria, Virginia’s turn of the 20th century community as a case study. Moving beyond simple ethnic markers and tacking among several analytical scales, this approach explores how material culture and space both reflected and helped create new social identities. A few themes emerge

This study examines the subsistence strategies of Archaic Period inhabitants (9.0–3.5 cal. ka) of the Lake Titicaca Basin, located in the high Andes of South America. Faunal data from three Archaic Period sites in the Ilave region of Peru are used to explore the dietary habits of early foragers spanning over five millennia. Comparative analysis reveals heavy investment in camelids, with deer serving

Recent rock art research in the Pali Aike volcanic field (PAVF, southern Argentina and Chile) expanded the chronology (ca. 3100B.P.) and morphological and technical repertoire of abstract-geometric and figurative paintings of the “Río Chico style”. This paper discusses the spatial distribution of painted motifs to understand the criteria that guided the representation strategies and the flow of information

The Economic Defendability Model posits that foragers exploiting dense and predictable resources should establish defended territories, while foragers exploiting unpredictable resources manage shortfall risk by ranging across larger areas that they do not invest in defending. While these expectations are supported by ethnographic observations, archaeological tests have been limited to peri-aquatic

Salmon fishing and storage have been integral elements of Stó:lō-Coast Salish household life, economy, and identity in the Fraser Valley and lower Fraser Canyon of southwestern British Columbia for millennia. However, taphonomic factors affecting salmon remains make it difficult to directly study variability in food-related labor allocations, prompting us to focus instead on fish processing tools.

Faunal taxonomic abundances and composition are often used as one line of evidence to measure different dimensions of prehistoric population interaction between food producers and foragers. This paper presents a comparative analysis of ethnoarchaeological faunas created by neighboring foragers and farmers in Central Africa who maintain on-going interactions based partly on the exchange of wild resources

This paper investigates different body techniques for carrying heavy loads by individuals buried at Abu Fatima, a Nubian Bronze Age cemetery in Sudan. Drawing on iconographic evidence from ancient Egypt and Nubia, as well as African and other ethnographic records, the paper aims to understand gendered patterns behind load-carrying practices and their traces on skeletal remains. A multi-proxy approach

Many animal species exploited by humans play important roles beyond simply consumption. While disentangling the diverse roles of animals and animal resources from the archaeological record can be difficult, it is especially important for establishing holistic perspectives of past lifeways and economies. Recent zooarchaeological investigations at the Mound Key site in southwestern Florida have identified

In this article, we examine existing data on Southern Jê burial caves (SJBCs) in the Southern Brazilian Highlands to discuss their spatiality, chronology, symbolic aspects, and relation to mound and enclosure complexes (MECs), another Southern Jê burial practice. Through map creation and temporal analysis, we explore chronological and hierarchical hypotheses previously used to explain the dynamic relationship

Cultural interaction has been shown to be important in the (re)organization of social relationships in pre-contact North America and an important causal factor in Mississippian origins throughout the U.S. Southeast and Midwest. Indeed, recent research has documented the significance of migration and other forms of far-flung interactions in the spread of Mississippian lifeways. The Mississippian period

Despite a long tradition of characterizing the Bell Beaker-associated human groups as mobile herders, there has been limited evidence for their economy and diet, both key defining factors for human lifeways. Bone nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen stable isotopes from a collective burial in Sardinia provide the first data on the diet of Mediterranean Bell Beaker groups, crucial as there is the presence of

This paper reports on the results of archaeological excavations at the cemetery sector of the Middle Horizon (AD 650–1000) Wari site of Pataraya, located in the middle Nasca valley of southern Peru, and biochemical analyses of human skeletal remains recovered during those excavations. The findings reported here demonstrate that the sharp differences in cultural practice between Pataraya’s occupants

For a number of years, researchers have associated Late Bronze Age (LBA) (2100 – 1300 BCE) settlements in the Trans-Ural steppe with nomadic pastoralism. This would have involved entire populations making periodic movements between pastures. To test this claim, I have synthesized eight lines of data from more than 40 archaeological sites. The analysis of settlement architecture, material culture accumulation

Beyond military conquest, the successful consolidation of Tawantinsuyu likely depended on the exercise of soft power and ideological cooptation. The widespread distribution of Inca pottery suggests it played a key role in the imperial agenda. Archaeological evidence from across the Empire indicates that provincial potters were mobilized to generate the distinctive vessels associated with the state

Social zooarchaeology stresses that animals’ role in social and political life is not limited to the merely “economic”. Recent studies of cattle and caprines’ role in the development of inequality, hierarchy, and political authority in Southwest Asia have begun to productively incorporate the “symbolic” or “social” value of animals. Taking an action-oriented anthropological approach to theorizing value

Archaeologists have traditionally conceptualized culture areas and associated ethnic group boundaries as reflecting significant degrees of dissimilarity between “core” and “peripheral” cultural types. This dissimilarity is typically thought to correlate with gradual geographic isolation. However, an alternative model has been presented that underscores the importance of inter-group interaction to ethnic

The Classic Maya (250–900 CE) lowlands of Mesoamerica were home to dozens of interconnected polities whose elites shared an intellectual and material culture. They also sustained common sociopolitical institutions like divine kingship, which relied in part on ritual performance to legitimate dynastic rule. This article suggests that exogamous marriage was an important context for maintaining this shared

At ∼160 ka, near the end of our African speciation, archaeologists identify a change from sporadic to habitual use of red ochre, interpreted as ‘blood-red colorant’ for decorating performers’ bodies during group rituals, with habitual ritual considered pre-requisite to symbolic culture’s ‘shared fictions’ (Dapschauskas et al. 2022). This article considers the proposed motivations for such behaviour

The Early Mycenaean era in mainland southern Greece is characterized by radical social transformations. The changes observed in the mortuary sphere include the introduction of new practices that stressed group identity alongside traditional modes of burial. Our hypothesis is that these mortuary choices should be seen as a social strategy for redefining kinship relations.

The Machile River and its surrounding tributaries in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa over much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early 2nd-millennium CE Kanono site represents a short-lived but well defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming

The article has two informative levels: (a) describes the construction, distribution and use of tandyr cores as a traditional product of the bread-baking culture in southern Kyrgyzstan; compares these processes with the well-documented phenomenon of tandyrs in the Middle East and (b) tries to define the implications for potential archaeological research of tandyrs in this area, where (despite their

This paper explores how technology can be used to discern socio-cultural variations and how technological analyses can contribute to a better understanding of the origins and aftermaths of fundamental socio-political changes in prehistoric societies. To study pottery technology, we carried out petrographic analysis on ceramics from six Late Neolithic (ca. 5000–4500 BCE) and Early Copper Age (ca. 4500–4000

Several prehistoric societies did not develop robust hierarchical systems even after centuries of population clustering and advancements in constructing structural earthworks and crafting materials like ceramics and alloys. What social dynamics characterized these non-state complex societies and how did they influence technological production? Here we analyze population clustering and hierarchical

In this paper we adopt a new perspective on the chronology and settlement strategies of the last Mesolithic societies of the Ebro basin. For this purpose, we applied concepts from population biology (carrying capacity) and redefined the catchment area of the sites using GIS analysis tools. We concluded that the last hunter-gatherer groups lived below their means, so that physical and cultural reproduction

Political aspects of imperial architecture are usually evaluated in terms of the symbolism of specific buildings as opposed to overall site planning and layout. This reflects a shortcoming in our understanding of imperial tactics, as provincial site layouts were likely politically calculated. Here we present an architectural study of the Inka provincial capital of Turi, a well-preserved local population

This paper investigates temple-building traditions using concepts of space and place, exploring various perspectives of temple placemaking in archaeological, textual and ethnographic data. The study first looks at temple-building practices in Mesopotamia and South Asia, before exploring the nature of temple-building traditions in the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE southern Levant. From Mesopotamia, a unique

This article addresses Postclassic Maya population recovery in the aftermath of the collapse of Terminal Classic period political centers by 1100 CE in northern Yucatan, Mexico. While much has been written about the collapse of northern lowland Classic period Maya civilization by the eleventh century CE, we focus here on longer-term outcomes from a demographic perspective, during the Postclassic period

We investigate archaeological evidence for the early production of (or commonly named ‘baler’) shell knives recovered from Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene deposits in Boodie Cave, Barrow Island. The site is in the Country of Thalanyji people in northwestern Western Australia. The oldest shell knife fragments were recovered from units dated to 46.2–42.6 ka, making this one of the oldest shell tool

The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock art traditions. Painted in vibrant ochre pigments, the artwork depicts abstract and figurative designs – including a high diversity of animal motifs – and holds key information for understanding how Amazonians made sense of their world. We compare a zooarchaeological assemblage with painted depictions of

The environmental impacts of human societies are generally assumed to correlate with factors such as population size, whether they are industrialized, and the intensity of their landscape modifications (e.g., agriculture, urban development). As a result, small-scale communities with subsistence economies are often not the focus of long-term studies of environmental impact. However, comparing human-environment

Understanding early animal domestication is complicated by disagreement over what, in cultural terms, differentiates domestic (closely managed? privately owned?) from wild and by the difficulty of distinguishing these categories zooarchaeologically. We describe recent feral populations of goats, sheep, cattle and pigs in Greece, comprising descendants of animals escaped or released from controlled

Applications of SNA to interpret archaeological evidence have been increasing dramatically, as has an interest in identifying communities and neighborhoods. Social Network Analysis (SNA) can be a lens and a tool to explore neighborhoods and communities with archaeological datasets from a range of temporal periods and regions. The spatial distribution of material culture facilitates the creation of

Early agricultural practices are often viewed as such a radical transformation that they not only structured and drove the long-term development of subsistence economies, but also required a dramatic reorganization of how community-wide economic relations were reckoned and enacted. This article examines how data derived from loci of economic production can inform us about the structure of economic