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.

Most pristine states formed in the context of competing chiefdoms, when one of the latter succeeded in incorporating its rivals into a larger polity. Some of the processes evident during state formation include chiefly cycling, biased transmission, territorial expansion, and the gaining of competitive advantage. In some archaeological circles, however, it has become fashionable to reject ecological, demographic, and technological processes, and seek agent-based or ideological explanations for state formation. This essay, delivered as the tenth McDonald Lecture, examines five agents who modified ideologies and created states from chiefdoms. It concludes that process and agency are complementary, rather than antithetical, perspectives; thus the latter is unlikely to make the former obsolete.

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.

The gesture-call practices of early hominids were of a different order from those of their primate relatives, the ancestors of present day apes. The Tool-Cue Model postulates how our ancestors might have used tools both as functional instruments and as icons. The central thesis of the model treats communication as action systems mediated by signs, the central communicative action being the action cue: a communicative act that requires further behaviours to be satisfied. Tools are interpreted as framing devices, promoting the emergence of pragmatic/semantic duality. This latter feature is based on grammatical structures that include pragmatic and semantic meanings in the same utterance. Human language, i.e. symbolic pragmatics, appropriated the action cue meaning of tools and, simultaneously, transformed tools into symbolic ‘warrants’ by which modern humans transform both their speech and material behaviours into the types of social activities we intend. Post-Oldowan Lower and Middle Pleistocene lithics serve as empirical evidence in support of the Tool-Cue Model.

The British Iron Age had an enduring set of traditions involving the east– west axis of the sun's path, the sunwise progression of movement and the classification of animals. Although these traditions were manifested regionally in slightly different ways and were modified, contested and restructured during the Iron Age, they provide us with a key to unlock aspects of the symbolism and practices of daily life. The significance of westerly orientations and of pigs in embodying and expressing associations of high status and other social differences were principal features of a strongly hierarchical society whose social differences were otherwise largely muted in terms of material culture distinctions. The cemeteries of East Yorkshire provide a detailed insight into the ordering of these social differences which were, even then, only rarely expressed through grave goods and mortuary elaboration. The burials of the Yorkshire elite are suggestive of a conception of sacred leadership or kingship, which included the symbolic spearing of certain individuals. Animal offerings were used in the structuring of social differences, with pig portions and sheep bones marking thedead of elite and commoner groups respectively.

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.

Drinking and feasting were an integral part of life in Iron Age Europe and the British Isles. The distribution of food and especially drink in prescribed fashion played a key role in establishing and maintaining social relationships. Alcoholic beverages were important consumable status items in prehistoric Europe, serving as a social lubricant as well as a social barrier. The metal, ceramic and wooden vessels required for the preparation, distribution and consumption of these beverages were a vehicle for inter- and intragroup competition, and underwent considerable change, both symbolic and material, through time. This article will attempt a cognitive analysis of the material culture of Iron Age drinking and feasting by integrating archaeological and documentary evidence. The impact of contact with the Mediterranean world, gender configurations, and the ideology of power and patronage will be discussed in relation to changing material culture assemblages.

Long viewed as ‘kitchen middens’, the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area have -provided archaeologists of coastal California insight into the subsistence and ecology of precontact native groups. In this article, the authors develop a framework for understanding the cultural significance of these shellmounds which regards them as intentional cultural features, incorporates social context, and builds on earlier subsistence-focused studies of the shellmounds in order to better appreciate the meaning of the numerous human remains interred therein. A structural analysis is then used to show that the concepts of food and ancestors joined together at shellmounds, so much so that ritual attention to the ancestors was very likely regarded as essential to ensuring a continuing supply of food.

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.

Colour is one of the most prominent features of human experience, but has often been ignored or overlooked in archaeological research. All practising archaeologists are aware of the colour of the materials which they handle — be they stone artefacts, painted pots, prehistoric monuments (frontispiece) or historical buildings. Yet all too frequently these items are robbed of their colour when they are published as black and white photos, abstract plans or reductionist line drawings. Equally discouraging is the fact that original colours are frequently missing or faded, removed by the passage of centuries. We know, for example, that the famous marble Cycladic figurines were originally brightly painted, but few traces of colouring survive. Yet such traces are enough to alert us to the radical transformation which colour could bring to old and faded remains.

In this Viewpoint feature we have invited a range of specialists to consider the meaning of colour in early societies. The intention has been to focus on those societies where evidence of colour is not so readily apparent. Egyptian art and Palaeolithic caves have their place in this debate, but we are also interested in the selection of stones of particular colours for tools or structures, and for the use of colour in textiles; areas in which almost all early societies must have been engaged.

The meaning of colour may be approached at a variety of levels. In literate societies, or those with a rich and detailed iconographic tradition, it may be possible to explore the particular significance of different colours in myths or rituals. Such understanding is more difficult in the case of prehistoric societies, yet even here we can gain some insight into colour symbolism by careful consideration of context, or by cautious appeal to common human experience. Context may suggest that red ochre in burials equates with blood, common experience that yellow is associated with the sun, and blue with the sky or the sea. The value accorded to particular colours can also be indicated by the workmanship and finish which objects received, and the distances that materials travelled: polished jadeite from the Alps to Scotland, or lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to Mesopotamia.

As the following articles demonstrate, all societies are concerned about colour, and such concern can be traced back to at least the Upper Palaeolithic, if not before. To what extent particular colours, such as red or black, have cross-cultural significance, is an altogether more difficult question. Colour awareness and colour sensitivity must however be an integral part of any archaeological analysis concerned with the development and nature of human cognition.