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This chapter examines sacred landscapes in Brittany. These include those in Saint-Just in central Brittany, those of the Crozon peninsula in the far west, and those of the Avrille region to the south. This chapter highlights the importance of standing stones in prehistoric Brittany and analyses the link of the stone monuments to the landscape and with the structure of rocks. It also explains the common features of the stone settings of Saint-Just, Crozon, and Avrille in terms of using extracted the blocks from outcrops, rather than taking opportunistic advantage of detached boulders.

This chapter discusses how stone monuments at selected Late Archaic (3000–1800 B.C.) and Early Horizon (1200–200 B.C.) sites on the north central coast of Peru provide insights into social transformation processes across collective and autocratic societies. The monuments under analysis are upright stone slabs (huancas) found at a number of Late Archaic sites in the Norte Chico region, as well as the row of towers at Chankillo dated to the late Early Horizon in the Casma Valley. Christie and Piscitelli argue that these upright stone monuments demarcated places and spaces in which people coordinated collective actions representing varying trajectories of social change. The political and ritual landscapes constructed at the Norte Chico and Chankillo sites were decidedly inward-oriented, concerned with establishing community centers and creating order. The sheer scale of the settings and the related coordination of ritual use there suggest emerging elites and corporate hierarchies. Following the trajectory of an expansionist state on the other hand, the Inca political landscape looks outward from long-existing centers. Comparative study of stone monuments and their associated ideologies, along with the study of place-making, can help illuminate social changes in the Andes over time.

This chapter focuses on the microscale of political analysis by considering how individuals, households, factions, power blocs, and communities participate in the politics of the Classic period. The topics examined are: the foundations of political power, the role of authority and legitimacy, claims to power, discourses of power, the existence and role of councils, the political power of commoners, and the rituals of politics depicted in Maya art in public stone monuments, in portable polychrome vessels, and in small figurines.

This chapter examines tombs and stone monuments in Brittany during the Late Neolithic Period. It describes different tomb types and their relationship to variations in funerary practices and highlights the presence of engraved motifs and features carved in raised relief in Neolithic megalithic tombs. It also discusses the symbolism of the Late Neolithic tombs in relation to the ‘great houses’ of third millennium Brittany and the structural similarities between tombs and houses.

Visitors, dealers, collectors, and archaeologists in modern times have judged the impressive pharaonic stone monuments to be physically encumbered by post-pharaonic reuse and, accordingly, have sought to return the tombs and mortuary temples to an imagined “pristine” state. Over half of the edited corpus of Coptic papyri (about 3,300 items) can be attributed to the region (Delattre 2005–), with the result that the site is one of the best documented in antiquity. Nationally aligned institutions jockeyed to establish prominent collections under a greater or lesser pretense of scholarship and, in 1858, the Egyptian Antiquities Service began to regulate excavation. At the late antique town site of Memnonion/Jeme located at modern Madinat Habu, he apparently purchased a manuscript containing so-called Gnostic texts and now known as the Bruce Codex (Bodl., MS Bruce 96).

This chapter examines the history of Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Brittany. It describes the Late Mesolithic site distributions and community interactions, the spread of Danubian farmers through central Europe, and the Mesolithic communities in the emergence of Neolithic monumentality. It also investigates whether the construction of stone monuments was a reinterpretation of existing Mesolithic beliefs about landforms and material agency or it was an essentially Neolithic innovation.