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Atmospheric scenes compel anthropology into a dilution: a shift in concentration. Working through suspension as a condition through which to ask into life in the air, this Opening pauses with moments of arrest, distribution, and deposit by various airs. Such moments compel a reorientation of attention toward airy things even as they model a recomposition of anthropological inquiry by atmosphere. Exploring how sands shift and settle in a Chinese wind tunnel and how matsutake mushroom solids become aromatic vapors in Seoul, we move from considering materials in airborne states to a condition of suspension in atmosphere to which particulates and people alike are held. What could an anthropology in suspension become when its anthropos is subject to vaporization into a thing among others in the atmosphere’s composition?

Nineveh, Iraq, is one of the longest occupied cities in the world, dating at least back to the mid-7th millennium BC. UC Berkeley excavations uncovered a district of large dwellings and wide streets near the Maski Gate (MG22), providing a stratigraphic history of Late Assyrian ceramics at the centre of the empire through to the 7th century BC.

The invention of the bow and arrow was a pivotal moment in the human story and its earliest use is a primary quarry of the modern researcher. Since the organic parts of the weapon – wood, bone, cord and feathers – very rarely survive, the deduction that a bow and arrow was in use depends heavily on the examination of certain classes of stone artefacts and their context. Here the authors apply rigorous analytical reasoning to the task, and demonstrate that, conforming to their exacting checklist, is an early assemblage from Sibudu Cave, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which therefore suggests bow and arrow technology in use there 64 millennia ago.

Throughout the Palaeolithic and across the globe small, regular cores were made using bipolar techniques, in which the object was placed between an anvil and hammer. While there has been much discussion about whether they might have been used as tools or were debris from a manufacturing process it is likely that both are true in different locations and at different times. What is distinctive about the bipolar technique is that it allows knappers to work artefacts down to a very small size, and this may facilitate the extension of both core life and tool life. In this article a model of that miniaturization process is evaluated against Holocene material from Australia and Middle Stone Age material from South Africa. It is likely that the capacity to miniaturize lithic artefacts would have been valuable in a variety of Palaeolithic contexts.

Variations in the material culture in Africa in the Late Pleistocene indicate that it was a period of rapid cultural change not previously observed in the Middle Stone Age. In southern Africa, two techno-traditions, the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort, have raised interest because of their relatively early cultural complexity. What might have driven the development of the innovative practices and ideas between ca. 77,000 and 59,000 years ago? Explanations for the ascent and demise of these two entities must focus on analyses of recovered materials and in situ features such as hearths and spatial patterning. They must also consider whether these innovations are likely to have ensued from cognitive evolution inHomo sapiensand trace the changes in brain organization and cognitive functions that best explain them. This article presents an updated review of the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort industries and argues that innovations during the Late Pleistocene must be related to a previous expansion of the higher association areas of the temporal and parietal cortices underlying higher theory of mind, perspective taking, and attentional flexibility.

What benefits were derived from the invention of pottery, and why did ceramics remain marginal for so long? The increasing use of pottery has been seen as a response to large-scale harvesting in a model that favours economic advantage through increased efficiency. This paper challenges that view; combining carbon and nitrogen isotope and lipid analysis, the authors argue that pottery was used selectively for storing or processing valued exchange commodities such as fish oil. Its use can be seen as part of broader developments in hunter-gatherer society, featuring seasonal gatherings, collective feasting and a new articulation of social relations.

The burgeoning of archaeological research in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq is one of the great success stories of world archaeology today. For twenty years it was impossible for western archaeologists to work in Iraq, and for most of this time there were also heavy restrictions on the activity of Iraqi archaeologists. In addition to this Kurdistan remains a region never systematically explored. The conference presented the first opportunity for the leading figures in this renaissance of research in the area to gather and present all the key new projects which are revolutionising our understanding of the region.

Archaeologists today, as in the past, continue to divide their stone artifact assemblages into categories and to give privilege to certain of these categories over others. Retouched tools and particular core forms, for instance, are thought to contain more information than the unretouched flakes and flake fragments. This reflects the assumption that information to be gained from stone artifacts is present within the artifact itself. This study evaluates a continued interest in the final form of stone artifacts by first considering ethnographic accounts of stone artifact manufacture and use in Australia and then by utilizing the patterns observed in these accounts to investigate assemblage patterning within an Australian archaeological case study. Reading the ethnographic accounts provides no indication that Aboriginal people valued more or less complex artifacts, in uniform ways, in every situation. In fact, the opposite is true. Stone artifacts were always valued in some sense but which ones, and in which ways, depended on the situations the people who needed the artifacts found themselves in. Aboriginal people were quite capable of making and using expedient and informal artifacts in complex ways. The significance of these observations is considered for stone artifact studies in general and in relation to a case study from western New South Wales, Australia.

Finds distributions plotted over landscapes and continents, once the mainstay of archaeological cultural mapping, went into a lengthy period of decline when it was realised that many were artefacts of modern recovery rather than patterns of their own day. What price then, the rich harvest of finds being collected by modern routine procedures of rescue work and by metal-detectorists? The author shows how distribution patterns can be validated, and sample bias minimised, through comparison with maps of known populations and by presenting the distributions more sharply by risk surface analysis. This not only endorses the routine recording of surface finds currently undertaken in every country, but opens the door to new social and economic interpretations through methods of singular power.

Determination of the provenance of material culture by means of chemical analysis has a long and distinguished history in archaeology. The chemical analysis of archaeological objects started in the intellectual ferment of late-eighteenth-century Europe (Caley 1948, 1949, 1967; Pollard 2013), almost as soon as systematic (gravimetric) means of chemical analysis had been devised (Pollard in prep.). Many of the leading scientists of the day, such as Vauquelin, Klaproth, Davy, Faraday and Berzelius, carried out analyses of archaeological objects as part of their interests in the contents of the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ of the day (Pollard&Heron 2008). The subject moved frommere curiosity to systematic and problemorientated study with the work of G¨obel (1842),Wocel (1854), Damour (1865) and Helm (1886), who essentially formulated the idea of ‘provenance studies’—that some chemical characteristic of the geological rawmaterial(s) provides a ‘fingerprint’ which can bemeasured in the finished object, and that if an object from a remote source is identified at a particular place, then it is evidence of some sort of direct or indirect contact and ‘trade’ between the two places.