From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

Abstract

Cognitive archaeologists infer from material remains to the cognitive features of past societies. We characterize cognitive archaeology in terms of trace‐based reasoning, which in the case of cognitive archaeology involves inferences drawing upon background theory linking objects from the archaeological record to cognitive (including psychological, symbolic, and ideological) features. We analyse such practices, examining work on cognitive evolution, language, and musicality. We argue that the central epistemic challenge for cognitive archaeology is often not a paucity of material remains, but insufficient constraint from cognitive theories. However, we also argue that the success of cognitive archaeology does not necessarily require well‐developed cognitive theories: Success might instead lead to them.

Likeness-making and the evolution of cognition

“…This minimal interpretation and everything from hereon upwards is supported by the observation that the development of bilateral symmetry in the making of bifacial tools was an achievement roughly contemporaneous with the artefacts under consideration here; this development was pervasive, and it also requires a practical and conceptual grasp of equivalence relations and their reversibility as well as of shape constancy (Wynn 1979(Wynn , 1993(Wynn , 2002; see also Currie and Killin 2019). The precision and sophistication of tool-making enabled by bilateral symmetry will help to explain the precision and sophistication embodied in the Trinil and Bilzingsleben artefacts.…”

CHIELD: the causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database

“…Exploration: Evolutionary linguistics now includes many subfields within linguistics (Bergmann and Dale 2016;Berwick and Chomsky 2016), and also relates to other larger interdisciplinary fields of research, such as learning or cooperation (Kirby and Christiansen 2003;Progovac 2019). The methods are diverse, ranging from molecular genetics (e.g., Enard et al, 2002;Hitchcock, Paracchini and Gardner 2019), to archaeology (e.g., Noble and Davidson 1996;Currie and Killin 2019), to computational simulation (Steels 1997;Cangelosi and Parisi 2012;Jon-And and Aguilar 2019). It is therefore increasingly hard to keep up to date with all the developments in the field.…”

The Role of Ancient DNA Research in Archaeology

“…Further, archaeologists are also interested in how the peoples they study thought, which is not obviously accessed via aDNA techniques (see e.g. Currie and Killin 2019).…”