Summary. In later prehistory horse ownership was a manifestation of wealth and physical prowess, and demonstrated access to distant lands. Because of the expense and restricted availability of horses, they are often reduced to indicators of status without more nuanced considerations of how lived human-horse interactions enmeshed them in these status displays. To complicate the simple horse/status object equivalence, this article presents a specific case for the symbolic and social significance of horses in Early Iron Age south-eastern Slovenia through the lens of equine iconography, and argues that horses and particularly equestrianism were essential to embodying elite masculine identity. Broadly, this article seeks to move beyond equating high-status goods with high-status people by discussing how particular events, bodily abilities and human-animal relationships were all intertwined in the materialization of social distinction for a particular group.

Depictions of birds are overrepresented in the Dolenjska Hallstatt culture, and appear on over a quarter of artefacts depicting animals. A wide variety of artefacts with birds have been found primarily in graves, and crosscut gender, status, and age. However, poor preservation of zooarchaeological remains has made reconstructions of lived human-bird interactions difficult. This study uses ecological and ethological data, combined with local imagery, to provide insight into prehistoric human-bird interfaces in this area, and the cultural conceptions surrounding these interactions. Birds would have been a constant presence in the lives of Dolenjska Hallstatt people; however, human relationships with them were based more on observation than direct interaction. Birds were ubiquitous in imagery, and it is proposed that this stemmed from Dolenjska Hallstatt conceptions of birds as important observers of human actions, ritual mediators, and possibly guides or guardians. Their differences from humans and other animals distinguished themthey were set apart, and depictions highlighted non-normative behaviours. Birds in the Dolenjska Hallstatt worldview were more than animals, ascribed extraordinary capabilities that made them ritually potent and richly symbolic creatures.

Ram’s head beads are well-known items of personal adornment in the Dolenjska Hallstatt cultural group. Recent analysis has demonstrated that they are the most common zoomorphic artefacts in this region with 187 currently known. This article updates the list of known beads and contextualizes their significance in the Dolenjska Hallstatt cultural group. It is argued that the sheep imagery of these beads and their distribution in female graves is related to local textile production. It is proposed that beads signalled aspects of personal and economic identity for Dolenjska Hallstatt women related to the production of high-quality textiles. In addition, the distribution of these beads demonstrates Iron Age community networks on the western frontier of Dolenjska, and perhaps even reflects the movement of women between communities.

Christina Fredengren's keynote has identified a fundamental gap in archaeological studies of human-animal relationships -that is, inter-and intraspecies power differentials and their illumination of 'how situated worlds are made together with animals, but also how such making favours the thriving of certain beings at the expense of others' (Fredengren 2021:12). This is a long-overdue direction for human-animal studies, and it is laudable that Fredengren has raised the call to address this important issue. While Fredengren rightly points out limitations in the use of many of our previous heuristics such as entanglement and taxonomic approaches, I want to embody her recommendation that we take an affirmative approach by trying to revive the power of these heuristics, to build upon them and attend to questions of power that have been left unexplored. My goal in this commentary is to revisit some of her key points, and discuss how we might approach power in multi-species communities.The lens of entanglement has been quite productive in human-animal studies, and the call to 'look at who carries the heaviest burden in timeand site-specific entanglements, and thus what is tended to and what is excluded from benevolence and care' (Fredengren 2021:17) has the potential to be extremely productive. My mind is drawn to impactful work in zooarchaeology at multiple scales, from the life-history approach (Binois et al. 2013;Haruda et al. 2020;Losey et al. 2011; Tourigney et al. 2015) to the aggregate studies of animal trauma or pathologies (Van Neer et al. 2015) that show points of care as well as abuse. Often these studies are relatively idiosyncratic, as presentations of singular individuals who demonstrate some notable pathology or treatment, but they are nonetheless illuminat-