Cognition, materiality and monsters: the cultural transmission of counter-intuitive forms in Bronze Age societies

Abstract

In seeking to explain why some cultural traits are more ‘catching’ than others, evolutionary anthropologists have invoked the influence of cognitive constraints on the transmission of culture. Pascal Boyer’s explanation of the global popularity of religious beliefs in terms of their psychologically ‘counter-intuitive’ nature is a strong example. Drawing upon archaeological evidence from early civilizations, this article argues that such an approach does not in fact account satisfactorily for the observable distribution of a central type of counter-intuitive representation: that of the composite figure, or ‘monster’. A surprising feature of that distribution is the scarcity of composite figures in prehistoric art, prior to the Urban Revolution of the 4th millennium BC, after which their spread follows a highly patterned and selective (rather than ‘contagious’) trajectory of expansion. In interpreting this patterned spread of counter-intuitive forms, technological and institutional factors are brought into account alongside cognitive ones, with wider methodological implications for evolutionary approaches to the transmission of culture.