What Is Cognitive Archaeology?

Abstract

Abstract The field of cognitive archaeology has generated important and valuable insights into the cultural and evolutionary dimensions of human intelligence. However, the ways in which cognition is bound up with the body and the material world (forms and flows) has been traditionally overlooked or misrepresented. To the extent that such neglect continues, our understanding of human cognitive life and its material bases will remain necessarily restricted. This chapter explains why those problems persist and proposes an alternative material engagement approach to understanding the relationship between cognitive and material phenomena. One of the main objectives is to show how the theory of material engagement can aid understanding of the cognitive ecology of things and the material ecology of minds. Material Engagement Theory posits materiality as constitutive of human cognitive life. It also argues for the primacy of becoming over being. One can only understand human beings (what it is to be human) by understanding the modes of human becoming (how humans become). Such an approach requires a stretching of the archaeological imagination and vocabulary. To practice cognitive archaeology is to think across disciplinary boundaries in a radical sense. Mind is not in the head; mind is in the world. This chapter discusses the outline and implications of this alternative material engagement approach and illustrates some of the key concepts that can help us to rethink the concept of “mind” in the archaeology of mind.