The archaeology of the social brain revisited: rethinking mind and material culture from a material engagement perspective

Anna M Barona

doi:10.1177/1059712320941945

Abstract

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) has played a prominent role in interpreting the relationship between human social, cognitive and technological evolution in archaeology and beyond. This article examines how the SBH has been applied to the Palaeolithic material record, and puts forward a critique of the approach. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET) and its understanding of material agency, it is argued that the SBH has an inherently cognitivist understanding of mind and matter at its core. This Cartesian basis has not been fully resolved by archaeological attempts to integrate the SBH with relational models of cognition. At the heart of the issue has been a lack of meaningful consideration of the cognitive agency of things and the evolutionary efficacy of material engagement. This article proposes MET as a useful starting point for rethinking future approaches to human social cognitive becoming in a way that appreciates the co-constitution of brains, bodies and worlds. It also suggests how MET may bridge archaeological and 4E approaches to reconsider concepts such as the ‘mental template’ and Theory of Mind.

Highlights

Since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the social brain hypothesis (SBH) has captured the attention of disciplines in academia and beyond (e.g. Bennett, 2013; Gladwell, 2000)
Stade and Gamble (2019) have proposed that the SBH can add an important social, affective and relational dimension to evolutionary cognitive archaeology, and help reframe concepts such as Theory of Mind (ToM) which are often used in a cognitivist sense
Ten years on from the Lucy Project, what is the place of the SBH in our studies of past human thought and sociality? By revisiting the archaeology of the social brain, I have shown that it embodies an approach to the archaeology of mind that is ripe for some reconsideration

Summary

Introduction

Since its rise to prominence in the late 1990s, the social brain hypothesis (SBH) has captured the attention of disciplines in academia and beyond (e.g. Bennett, 2013; Gladwell, 2000). In the context of an incomplete material record, the SBH has been an invaluable tool to access the archaeologically invisible (e.g. language, story-telling, music) and to contextualise the ‘bones’ and the ‘stones’ within a larger evolutionary narrative (Gamble et al, 2011; Gowlett et al, 2012) It has provided a welcome emphasis on the social and affective context of human evolution, considering not just individual brains in isolation, but how minds evolved alongside other minds, landscapes and technology. The rapidly growing field of ‘4E’ cognition has been challenging this classical view, providing new ways of thinking about the nature and location of the mind, as well as the importance of the material world in constituting and shaping thought (see Newen et al, 2018 for overview) These new models see cognition as extended (not limited to the brain, but distributed to the environment), enactive (constituted in action), embedded (environmentally situated) and embodied (shaped by the body) – this comprises the four ‘E’s.2. It is proposed as a useful starting point from which to rethink the SBH, and a way to bridge archaeological and 4E perspectives to reconsider concepts such as the ‘mental template’ and ToM

The SBH

The archaeology of the social brain

Active artefacts and metaplastic minds

Conclusion