Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were economically and socially important to recent agropastoral societies. However, archaeological models emphasize cattle keeping and downplay the role of hunting among past farming groups. To address this discrepancy and investigate human–wild animal interactions over the last ~ 2000 years, we examined zooarchaeological data from 54 southern African Iron Age (first and second millennium AD) farming sites. Diversity and taxonomic information highlights how often and what types of animals people hunted. Comparisons with earlier and contemporaneous forager and herder sites in southern and eastern Africa show that hunting for social and economic purposes characterized the spread of farming and rise of complex societies in southern Africa. The long-term cultural integration of wild animals into food-producing societies is unusual from a Global South perspective and warrants reappraisal of forager/farmer dichotomies in non-Western contexts.

Animal domestication is a profound change for human societies, economies, and worldviews. The shifting definitions of animal domestication reflect its varying and process-like nature. Reindeer is one of the species whose domestication is not easily pinned down using standard definitions and research methodologies of animal domestication. In recent years, advances in archaeological methodology and the conceptual understanding of animal domestication have opened new avenues for research on this topic. This review summarizes recent research on the archaeology of reindeer domestication among the Indigenous Sámi of northern Fennoscandia. It compiles a chronological framework of reindeer domestication with an emphasis on the development of reindeer-herding practices and human–reindeer relationships. I argue that while a major transition to reindeer herding occurred among the Sámi from the 15th century onward, small-scale reindeer herding characterized by interspecies sociality, cooperation, and care developed earlier during the Late Iron Age, with regional variations in the timing and details of the events. By focusing on reindeer-herding practices and the human–reindeer relationships embedded in them, I also argue that reindeer domestication, and animal domestication in general, is a relationship constructed and constantly renegotiated in everyday interactions with the animals.

The Late Bronze Age (1700–900 BC) represents an extremely dynamic period for Mediterranean Europe. Here, we provide a comparative survey of the archaeological record of over half a millennium within the entire northern littoral of the Mediterranean, from Greece to Iberia, incorporating archaeological, archaeometric, and bioarchaeological evidence. The picture that emerges, while certainly fragmented and not displaying a unique trajectory, reveals a number of broad trends in aspects as different as social organization, trade, transcultural phenomena, and human mobility. The contribution of such trends to the processes that caused the end of the Bronze Age is also examined. Taken together, they illustrate how networks of interaction, ranging from the short to the long range, became a defining aspect of the “Middle Sea” during this time, influencing the lives of the communities that inhabited its northern shore. They also highlight the importance of research that crosses modern boundaries for gaining a better understanding of broad comparable dynamics.

In this article we argue that several of the dominant narratives concerning the political economy of the Chinese Bronze Age are in need of major revision, including its chronological divisions and assumptions of unilineal development. Instead, we argue that for many parts of China, the Bronze Age should begin in the third millennium BC and that there was significant political economic heterogeneity both within and between regions. Focusing on the issues of centralization and commercialization, we argue that, in spite of the tendency in the Chinese archaeological literature to equate complexity with centralization and hierarchy and to posit top-down redistributive economic models, there is little evidence of such institutions. To the contrary, our survey of nearly 2000 years of development turns up significant investment in public goods, especially before the Anyang period, as well as ample evidence of horizontal exchange and increasing commercialization.

The cities of the Indus civilization were expansive and planned with large-scale architecture and sophisticated Bronze Age technologies. Despite these hallmarks of social complexity, the Indus lacks clear evidence for elaborate tombs, individual-aggrandizing monuments, large temples, and palaces. Its first excavators suggested that the Indus civilization was far more egalitarian than other early complex societies, and after nearly a century of investigation, clear evidence for a ruling class of managerial elites has yet to materialize. The conspicuous lack of political and economic inequality noted by Mohenjo-daro’s initial excavators was basically correct. This is not because the Indus civilization was not a complex society, rather, it is because there are common assumptions about distributions of wealth, hierarchies of power, specialization, and urbanism in the past that are simply incorrect. The Indus civilization reveals that a ruling class is not a prerequisite for social complexity.

Little is known about Middle Preclassic/Formative lowland Maya belief systems or ideologies, compared to later periods, but with increasing research at Middle Preclassic sites and recognition of their nascent complexity, this topic merits investigation. Belief systems are investigated through perspectives on materialization (of ideological concepts); on order, legitimacy, and wealth; and on cooperation drawn from collective/corporate action theory and costly signaling (selectionist) theory. Early lowland belief systems are partially outgrowths of Archaic period hunter-gatherer, “tribal” lifeways, and some concepts about cosmology and supernatural forces may be pan-Mesoamerican and pan-New World (e.g., quadripartition; animacy of objects). The best-known early Mesoamerican belief system is that of the Early and Middle Formative Gulf Coast Olmecs and related peoples (especially in Oaxaca) beginning around 1700 BC or so. Middle Preclassic lowland Maya ideologies (considered primarily in terms of power relations) are examined and compared with those of the Olmecs in four material domains: site plans, landscapes, and architecture; sculpture; portable material culture; and iconography. Comparisons reveal significant differences between Maya and Olmec, visible in Olmec materializations of leaders’ power: massive sculptures and exotic goods (costly signaling). Early Maya ideology and concepts of order (including cooperation) and legitimacy (including corporate political strategies) were rooted in beliefs and myths about the creation of the world and its creatures (including humans), about cosmic renewal (especially solar movements), and about time.

This paper discusses the degree of social complexity in southeastern Europe in the fifth millennium BC and presents previously unreported evidence from the tell societies of the Lower Danube. Based on the analysis of stone, flint, and copper axes of various types from Pietrele in southern Romania, I argue that social distinction, as deduced from the Varna cemetery, also can be identified in contemporary neighboring regions with poorer burial rituals. In these societies, some members distinguished themselves by their access and accumulation of prestigious items, with a special emphasis on axes, adzes, and shaft-hole axes. This socioeconomic constellation was ideal for the adoption of metallurgy, which was considerably developed for the production of prestigious axe heads. These, in turn, stimulated innovation in other crafts and materials. Distribution patterns, source-critical consideration, and new excavation results indicate that the social order visible in the cemetery of Varna was not limited to the western Black Sea coast but was shared by neighboring communities, where the social reality was masked in seemingly egalitarian funeral rites. Through this discussion, I also bring in recent evidence for early metallurgy in southwestern Asia.