Cognitive Archaeology Research Paper

1. Definitions

Cognitive archaeology has been defined in various ways. According to Renfrew (1982) it is ‘the archaeology of the mind.’ Flannery and Marcus (1993, 261) define it as ‘a study of all those aspects of ancient culture that are the product of the human mind … cosmology … religion … ideology … iconography … and all other forms of human intellectual and symbolic behaviour that survive in the archaeological record.’

These definitions reflect a rejection of a long-held archaeological belief that cognitive phenomena or mental products cannot be observed in the archaeological record, let alone reconstructed from it. Cognitive archaeologists, in contrast, commit a significant part of their effort in reconstructing the past to just this area of concern. While they do not deny the relevance of culture-history, technology, adaptation, subsistence, trade, and other traditional archaeological topics, cognitive archaeologists argue that a holistic interpretation or explanation of the past requires more than these traditional topics alone can provide.

2. Philosophical And Theoretical Foundations

The development of cognitive archaeology as an intellectual trend has involved the rejection of certain key tenets of scientific archaeology as practiced by Anglophone researchers (variously called new, processual or settlement-subsistence archaeology) in the latter half of the twentieth century. One of these tenets is logical positivism as a philosophy of science, with its emphasis on explanatory cover laws, the hard distinction between theory and fact, and a belief in unequivocal singular tests for hypotheses. Another is behaviorism which implicitly serves as the explanatory paradigm for much processual archaeology (Peebles 1992). This emphasizes the importance of stimulus-response relationships in explanation, especially concerning adaptation to the environment, and denies the relevance of mind, intellect, and cognition in human action, along with their byproducts such as belief, ritual, and art. To the processual archaeologist these are epiphenomenal, meaning derivative in origin and secondary in importance, and therefore analytically irrelevant.

Cognitive archaeology has instead adopted ongoing developments in the philosophy of science, including especially post-positivist approaches. Commonly these maintain a commitment to scientific knowledge, albeit acknowledging that over time science only increasingly approximates the ‘real’ truth, with scientific method based on ‘inference to the best hypothesis’ rather than singular critical tests (Kelley and Hanen 1988). Implicit in much cognitive archaeology more-over is embodied scientific realism. This accepts the existence of a world independent of our understanding of it, as well as the fact that we can have stable knowledge of this world. But it also holds that knowledge is relative to our bodies, minds, and interactions with the environment. This conclusion derives from empirical results of cognitive neuro-sciences studies which show that certain universal aspects of human conceptual development result from the embodied nature of the mind (Lakoff and Johnson 1999).

These philosophical commitments resolve two fundamental even if largely unrecognized conceptual contradictions in processual archaeology. First, by adopting embodied scientific realism, cognitive archaeology supports a model of humankind and its development that is fully reconcilable with evolutionary principles. Processual archaeology, even when explicitly claiming to be evolutionarily based, instead implicitly invokes a pre-Darwinian model of disembodied reason and mind due to its disavowal of any real relevance for cognitive phenomena. Because cognitive capabilities (which we all share) are ignored, they must be taken as a given; they ‘just are’ in processual archaeological theory. Ultimately this position then must resort to creationism and divine intervention to explain the totality of the human condition, which must include our ability to think and reason. Second, by insisting that mental phenomena are irrelevant but also conceding that the goal of archaeological science is to create knowledge (a cognitive construct), processual archaeology further requires a difference in kind between prehistoric peoples, whose thinking is putatively irrelevant and epiphenomenal, and contemporary westerners, including archaeologists whose professional purpose is to create knowledge. Such a distinction in kind between different peoples precludes the kinds of law-like explanations that processual archaeology has sought as its goal. Cognitive archaeology gives equal weight to the importance of mental phenomena in the lives of both prehistoric and contemporary humans.

Other theoretical aspects of cognitive archaeology derive from its relationship with cultural anthropology. These partly reflect the definition of culture as a cognitive worldview, a system of beliefs and meanings, thereby helping to situate aspects of cognitive archaeological research as a kind of anthropological archaeology in the interpretation of prehistoric culture. Similarly, anthropological studies of the nature of traditional thought and belief systems (e.g., Sperber 1982) have dispelled the notion that these are necessarily irrational and therefore somehow inherently inaccessible to rationalist science. As anthropologist Robin Horton (1982) has instead shown, all cultures share a core of cognitive rationality that involves the development of theory, based on deductive, inductive, and analogical reasoning, used in the explanation, prediction, and control of events. The analysis and interpretation of culture and its expression in symbolism, meaning, and worldview need not then necessarily reduce to particularistic and empathic statements based on some kind of privileged access to the feelings of people in the past, but instead can be based upon empirically grounded generalizations that stand up to empirical analysis.

Perhaps most importantly, linguistic, psychological, and neuropsychological models of the human mind— brain and how it operates have been instrumental in cognitive archaeological studies. And while some of the topics that cognitive archaeologists include in their analyses, such as ritual, belief, symbolism, and meaning, are the same as those that are highlighted in humanist and postmodernist studies and approaches (called ‘post-processualism’ in archaeology), the models, techniques, and methods that the cognitive archaeologists employ to understand these aspects of the past are quite different from those that post- modernists might allow, as the scientific models used by cognitive archaeologists themselves imply.

3. Analytical Approaches: Linguistic And Psychological Models

A measure of the versatility of cognitive archaeology is seen in the fact that many of its applications have occurred at opposite ends of the archaeological spectrum: Paleolithic or Stone Age archaeology, which involves studies of the earliest human societies (even including in some cases the archaeology of prehuman hominids); and late prehistoric, protohistoric and historical archaeology, where direct cultural and linguistic links tie the archaeological past to recent peoples studied by ethnographers and historians.

Perhaps the first example of an in-depth cognitive archaeological study was provided by Paleolithic archaeologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan (1967) in his analysis of western European cave paintings dating from about 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. A similar approach was used by historical archaeologist James Deetz (1977) in his study of Euro-American Colonial artifacts. In both cases analysis was based on a structuralist model of mind. Originating in the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, structuralism posits a human mind that organizes empirical phenomena and concepts in terms of binary oppositions or dualities: black versus white; male versus female; good versus bad; etc. Structuralist analysis then concerns not so much the dual objects themselves but the relationships between the pairs. Both Leroi-Gourhan and Deetz showed that such a relational structure could be identified in their respective Paleolithic and Colonial data, thereby significantly amplifying their abilities to make inferences about the symbolic meanings of their archaeological remains.

Psychological models of the human brain–mind have figured prominently in other cognitive archaeological studies. Paleolithic archaeologist Thomas Wynn (1989), for example, has used psychologist Jean Piaget’s theories on the development of thought in children and what these imply about spatial abilities to infer kinds of intelligence and levels of cognitive development in Homo habilis and Homo erectus, based on analyses of the kinds of stone tools that these ancient hominids created. Psychologist William Noble and archaeologist Iain Davidson (e.g., 1996) have collaborated in a series of studies, bringing together archaeological evidence on early symbol-making with theories of perception and communication in order to chart the evolution of the human mind and the appearance of language. Steven Mithen (1996) has invoked neural models of brain modularity along with cognitive scientist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences in an effort to explain the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution’: the seemingly sudden appearance of art, symbolism, and presumably belief roughly 50,000 years ago, literally tens of thousands of years after the earliest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans. In these cases psychological models have not been used to help explain the archaeological record: rather, the archaeological record has been employed in order to make inferences, informed by psychological theories, about prehuman and human intellectual and cognitive evolution.

4. Analytical Approaches: Neuropsychological Models

A subset of the psychological models used in cognitive archaeological studies involves neuropsychology: models based on theories of the mind–brain and the nervous system and how the two interact. These have been particularly influential in analyses of hunter-gatherer rock art tied to shamanistic religions where trance or altered states of consciousness (ASC) were considered key kinds of religious experiences. Because all humans share the same neural architecture, the mental, visual, emotional, and bodily reactions of ASC fall within a predictable range, regardless of cause, culture, or time period (Hobson 1994). This fact creates a kind of ‘neuropsychological bridge’ promoting analytical access to aspects of the ancient mind that involved ASC experiences.

Using the results of clinical studies, Lewis-Williams and Dowson (1988) constructed a model of the effects of ASC on mental imagery—the ‘visions’ of a shaman’s trance. Their model has three components: three progressive stages of ASC; the principles by which mental imagery is perceived at each stage; and the seven most commonly perceived entoptic phenomena, the phosphenes or geometric light images generated in the brain and visual system during the first stage of an ASC. After confirming the validity of their model using corpora of rock art known from ethnographic evidence to have been produced by shamans to depict visionary imagery, these archaeologists then used it to test whether European Paleolithic rock art, which lacks any ethnographic record, was also shamanistic in origin.

Central to their analysis is the use of analogy, but in this case analogy based on timeless and unchanging determining structures (human neuropsychology and its effects on ASC imagery), not analogy based on formal similarities. Note too that their concern was the origin of Upper Paleolithic art, not its meaning. While neuropsychology predicts human reactions to ASC, it does not tell us how such experiences will be interpreted or understood by different peoples or cultures and at different times. Subsequent neuropsychological studies of rock art have also considered the origins of universal aspects of shamanic symbolism, such as ‘mystical flight’ or ‘death and rebirth,’ as metaphoric expressions of the bodily and emotional hallucinations of ASC which were used verbally and graphically to describe what otherwise is a largely ineffable experience (Whitley 2000).

5. The Direct Historical Approach

Another analytical strategy, called the direct historical approach, involves the development of interpretive models of aspects of traditional cultures, like religion or ideology, based on ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence. If derived from directly relevant cultures, these models can be cautiously applied to the pre-historic past to both chart continuity and identify change in cognitive systems. Marcus and Flannery (1994), for example, used sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish documents to reconstruct Zapotec Indian religion in southern Mexico. Comparisons with archaeological evidence of religion and ritual indicated that the ethnohistorically described religious system first appeared between 200 BC and AD 100. Thomas Huffman (1996) has likewise used African Nguni ethnography concerning settlement structure, religion, and ideology to interpret the site of Great Zimbabwe, dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Though sometimes criticized for projecting ethnography on to the prehistoric past, careful applications of the direct historical approach need do no such thing. Indeed, Huffman has shown that they can result in a rewriting of aspects of the ethnographic record when the archaeological evidence contributes subsidiary information not previously documented in writing. Moreover, the applicability of the direct historical approach is enhanced by the fact that religious and belief systems tend to be very conservative and slow to change, as other recent archaeological analyses have shown (e.g., Tacon et al., 1996).

6. Future Trends

Two circumstances favor the continued development and growth of cognitive archaeology. The first is its scientific robustness, based on the fact that many practitioners successfully incorporate different methodologies and kinds of data in their analyses and interpretations. Rock art researchers, for example, have combined the direct historical approach with neuropsychological and physical models, creating convergent scientific theories (e.g., Whitley et al., 1999). These are advantaged because the use of different kinds of data tested with distinct methodologies greatly enhances the degree of confirmation of their hypotheses and ensures that they do not follow from any one set of methodological assumptions. The results are scientific interpretations and explanations that are as empirically grounded and as well-tested as any that archaeology can offer.

Equally importantly, cognitive archaeology increasingly borrows from the cognitive neurosciences, an area of research that has advanced dramatically in the 1990s and which promises to influence greatly, if not change, all disciplines concerned with human behavior. Archaeologists have not yet exploited the range of information that is relevant to their research and that is currently available in the cognitive neurosciences, nor can we yet predict what future advances in this field will imply for archaeology. But what is certain is that, as cognitive neuroscientists improve our understanding of how the contemporary human mind-brain operates, this will contribute further to our understanding of cognitive aspects of the prehistoric past.

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