During the Late Pleistocene, children in southwest France and northern Spain grew up engaging with the world around them through the lenses of locally and historically situated pictorial cultures. This particular period and region is not the site of the earliest example of symbolic behaviour, nor is it the only example of the production of imagery during the Pleistocene but the rich record of Franco-Cantabrian visual material culture provides a unique opportunity to explore how children learned to decode and transform the world around them through imagery. In this paper, focusing on parietal art, I consider the biological, cognitive and social underpinnings of the uniquely human ability to move between two and three dimensional worlds and to perceive a fourth dimension—time—through the perception of motion from still images. These abilities, which can be traced through the archaeological record, allowed children and the adults they became new ways of imagining and acting in the world.

‘Cosmovision in New World Ritual Landscapes’ is a Special Section including articles that explore portions of North, Central and South America where ceremonial or conceptual landscapes took differing forms. Two pivotal scholars (Ashmore, Broda) who have previously written on the subject are included in this group. Building upon themes of religious deity and other symbolic markers for clan territorial divisions (Sabo, Hilliard, Walker), urban settlement and modelling (Landau) and ethnographic information on ritual practice or cultural perspectives on land and spatial boundaries (Vining), these authors implicitly consider the possibility that cosmovision is a cultural universal. One unique aspect of their approach is the way that they connect varied landscapes with settlement concentrations or city centres, showing how cosmovision is evident in both rural and central place making.

Two recent studies—the first by MacDonald & Roebroeks (2013), the second by Tallerman (2013)—draw inferences about the social use of language by premodern hominins from data about the linguistic behaviour of modern hunter-gatherers and other modern people with traditional cultures. Such inferences cannot be sound, though, unless they meet a particular requirement: they need appropriate warrants. These have to serve as conceptual bridges that span the ontological gap between the behaviours and capacities of modern humans and those of the premodern hominins concerned. Interestingly, both MacDonald & Roebroeks and Tallerman make a serious attempt to support their respective inferences with the aid of such conceptual bridges. The present article inquires whether these bridges are strong enough to serve this purpose, and argues that both bridges have components that are harmful to their solidity. In the process of arguing this, the article pursues the question of the conditions under which uniformitarian assumptions can be used as components of the substructure of the conceptual bridges needed for underpinning inferences about the use of language in the teaching and learning of subsistence skills by premodern hominins. More generally, the article elucidates an important limitation of the ethnographic record as a putative window on the evolution of language.

In Precolumbian Central Mexico and the southern Andes, the Aztec and the Inca states created ritual landscapes that were based on observation of the natural environment and of celestial phenomena, but were also closely connected to cosmovision, defined as the structured view of nature and the universe in relation to man. By means of sophisticated architectural projects the landscape was transformed according to the canons of cosmological concepts, thus unifying time and space into a dialectical interacting whole. Simultaneously, the creation of these sanctuaries also expressed the exercise of power of these expanding states. I analyse several examples of the ritual landscapes created by the Aztecs in the Central Highlands and the Basin of Mexico, that are confronted with examples from the Incas in their immediate domain of influence around their capital, Cuzco. The comparative study of Aztecs and Incas may contribute to a broader understanding of Native American societies and landscape archaeology.

We would like to begin by thanking the commentators for their thoughtful, informed and, for the most part, generous responses. Even Ofer Bar-Yosef, while clearly disagreeing deeply with our whole approach, has invested precious resources of time and thought in our paper. We shall respond commentary by commentary, but there are some common themes in the responses, and we will note those as we go through.

Aymara herders in the highland regions of southern Peru and Bolivia express highly ambivalent attitudes towards archaeological patrimony. In this post-colonial setting, they follow strong avoidance behaviours towards archaeological sites directly associated with gentiles — the mummified remains of prehistoric, pagan individuals. Conversely, certain archaeological features are incorporated into modern discourses. This selective embracing of archaeological landscapes inscribes socially relevant features within contemporary identities, while repudiating others. Aymara use perceived spatial and temporal distance, reinforced with linguistic and mytho-historic constructs, to map social difference onto archaeological landscapes. Perceived distance separates Aymara from undesirable gentiles, whose threatening characteristics are embedded in historic experience. They relegate these dangerous social others to the past and envelop them in notions of remoteness. Simultaneously, Aymara use perceived proximity with favourable sites to draw inclusive social and geographic boundaries around their communities and to establish strategic priority for themselves, often in the context of conflicts. These divergent responses are highly sensitive to economic aspirations, political environments and resource-rights disputes, indicating that instrumental motivations factor significantly in Aymara attitudes towards archaeological heritage. Such opposing interactions underscore the contingency of attitudes towards the archaeological past. Both, however, can be understood as part of a coherent worldview that uses space, time and distance to construct social landscapes.

American Indian rock art is distributed across a portion of the east-flowing Arkansas River Valley in a distinctive spatial pattern in which motifs and compositions referencing spirit world subject matter predominate along the north side of the river, in contrast to imagery depicting the observable world on the south. This pattern accords with cosmological components of the belief systems of Dhegiha Siouan-speaking tribes, as expressed in the spatial elements of other cultural phenomena, including village layouts and ritual choreographies, among such groups as the Osage and Quapaw, who occupied the region during later historic times. One sandstone prominence also located south of the river attracted the attention of Precolumbian artists, who decorated its exposed surfaces with an intriguing depiction of a mask, partly obscured by lichen, exhibiting the telltale eyes and other characteristics of the Mesoamerican rain god Tlaloc. Examination of this image, along with a second possible Mesoamerican- or Southwestern-inspired image located north of the river, serves to enlarge our understanding of the wider distributional pattern, especially on the topic of how local communities incorporated exotic ideas into the fabric of their cosmological landscapes.

Spatial logics are guiding ideals for how space should be structured, as determined by the culturally embedded decisions of architects and builders. I test various spatial logics within sub-communities at the city of Copan, Honduras, to better understand principles behind the planning of paired groups. Results support a prevailing cosmological logic, in keeping with work on concepts of directionality, and particularly with the significance of north and salience of a north–south building axis. The anthropology of space and place has gained much from an increased reliance on archaeological literature, as well as the closely related fields of geography and empirical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyses. Because we shape and are shaped by landscapes, consideration of spatial relationships should help us evaluate and refine our conceptions of social relations.

Essays in this Special Section highlight varied and convergent North, Central and South American expressions of knowledge and belief about time, space, and cosmovision, especially as manifest in lived experience inflected by politico-economic circumstance.