ANTH 235,
COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY, ART, & CEREMONIALISM
Cognitive archaeology is the study of past ways of thought
from material remains. It is, essentially, the archaeology of
the human mind.
Earlier generations of archaeologists tended in desperation
to create a kind of counterfeit history, “imagining” what
ancient people must have thought or believed.
To understand prehistoric human cognition, archaeologists
can investigate:
 how people went about describing and measuring their
world
 how people planned their monuments and settlements
(i.e., maps & models)
 which material goods people valued most highly and
perhaps viewed as symbols of wealth, authority, or
power
 the manner in which people conceived of the
supernatural (called cult practice by anthropologists)
It is generally agreed today that what most clearly
distinguishes the human species from other life forms is
our ability to use symbols in very complex ways – words
themselves are symbols.
National flag of the Republic of Macedonia
(Република Македонија)
American postcards, 1900-1907
Coca-Cola Company promotional “lucky” watch fob, ca. 1910
Buddhist talisman brooch, Singapore, modern
See also: http://www.reclaimtheswastika.com/
Investigating Human Symbolizing, An Evolutionary Perspective:
“Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have always shared landscape with humans.
They were part of the ecological matrix with which Homo sapiens evolved. They
were a part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species
arose. They were part of the spiritual systems we invented for coping. Every once in
a while, a monstrous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or a river to kill
someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster – like auto fatalities
today – that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the
familiarity. And it conveyed a certain message. Among the earliest forms of
human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.” From: Monster of God:
The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David
Quammen, page 3. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
As yet there is no clear archaeological methodology for
determining precisely when language arose (while it’s true
we can examine fossil human anatomy and recent
biomolecular evidence indicating that modern humans and
Neandertals shared the FOXP2 gene which is associated
with speech and language in modern humans, however
these data are still inconclusive). There are, however,
several lines of behavioral evidence we can use to look for
language’s proxy – complicated cognitive abilities:
 design in tool manufacture. Increasing complexity
and standardization through time
 consideration of planning time (the time elapsed
between the conception of an act and its execution).
EXAMPLE: Transport of raw materials to a distant
manufacturing site.
 evidence of organized behavior: living floors and
food sharing
 deliberate burial of human remains. Sungir, Russia
(ca. 24,000 years ago, below)
The roughly 24,000 year-old Upper Paleolithic burial from Sungir, Russia (about
200 km east of Moscow) of a man, 55-65 years old. Note the roughly 3,500
mammoth ivory beads and arctic fox teeth decorating the burial. They were
probably originally sewn on to clothing or a shroud.
 representations – often true symbolic behavior such
as Paleolithic cave art
Five ways in which humans use symbols:
1. measurement, (time, weights & measures) to help us
organize our relationship with the natural world
2. planning, to help us define our intentions more clearly
(plans, maps, models are all examples)
3. to organize and regulate relationships between
humans (money, military insignia, etc.)
4. to regulate human relations with the “Other World”
(religion and cult symbolism)
5. to describe the world through depiction
(representational art)
INDICATIONS OF EARLY THOUGHT INCLUDE:
Intentional burial practices:
 Teshik-Tash, Uzbekistan: Neandertal child burial
outlined by ibex horns and red ochre coloring.
 Shanidar Cave, Iraq: Neandertal human burials
accompanied by pollen indicating an offering of flowers.
 Atapuerca, Spain: between 32-50 pre-Neanderthal
individuals recovered from a single natural shaft that
excavators believe indicates intentional placement there
(there are no herbivore bones to suggest carnivore
activity and few stone tools, so Atapuerca was
apparently not a habitation site)
Artistic expression:
 Makapansgat, South Africa: this unmodified stone
cobble may have been transported by a human
ancestor to its find-spot almost three million years ago
due to its coincidental resemblance to a face.
 Tan-Tan, Morocco: ca. 400,000 years ago; an
anthropomorphic modified quartzite pebble.
 Berekhat Ram, Golan Heights, Israel: ca. 230,000 years
ago; an anthropomorphic female (?) carved pebble (ca.
2.5 cm long).
Paleolithic cave art: Clustered in specific regions (most
notably the Périgord and Pyrenees in southwest France and
Cantabria in northern Spain), it spans the whole of the
Upper Paleolithic, e.g., 30,000 – 10,000 years ago, with the
majority falling into the later part of this period (18,000 –
10,000 years ago), after the Last Glacial Maximum (e.g.,
after the coldest part of the last Ice Age).
First systematic approach to the study of cave art:
André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986), 1960s.
Leroi-Gourhan’s Upper Paleolithic “signs”
OTHER APPROACHES TO RECONSTRUCTING
PREHISTORIC HUMAN COGNITION:
 Measuring the world (units of time, length, and
weight): The development of standardized units was a
fundamental cognitive step and in many cases they can
be recognized archaeologically – calendars (e.g., ancient
Maya and Aztec), linear measurements (e.g., ancient
Egyptian “yardsticks”).
 Planning (cognitive maps of the future): Neolithic
village planning is recoverable architecturally.
Sculptor’s trial pieces and models. Ancient tombs that
are oriented to take advantage of specific celestial or
calendrical phenomena.
 Symbols of organization and power: money and other
symbols of value, trade in exotic “luxury” commodities,
architecture (elite structures, palaces, tombs).
 The archaeology of cult: illuminating a framework of
beliefs relating to supernatural or superhuman beings or
phenomena. Religion is a social institution (that can be
manipulated, as Karl Marx pointed out…). “Cult” is
used by anthropologists to refer to patterned actions in
response to a religious belief (“cult” is not a pejorative,
in spite of the word’s current use in colloquial American
English!).
Cults can sometimes be recognized archaeologically:
Classic Maya blood-letting ceremonies (below); animal
temples in Neolithic Turkey; references to totemic
animals in many early cultures.
The blood-letting rite of Lady Xoc of Yaxchilan, Chiapas, Mexico, ca. 725 CE.
While her husband, the king, Shield Jaguar, holds a large torch above her, she pulls
a thorn-lined rope through her tongue. Her blood drips into a woven basket
containing blood-stained cloth, the stingray spine that pierced her tongue, and the
end of the rope. The shedding of Mayan royal blood was an act of supreme
sacrifice to gain the gods’ favor and thus perpetuate the cycle of human life.
TWO IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER:
1. Methods of working in cognitive archaeology need to
be rigorous, objective, and explicit. It is not
appropriate to merely speculate about what prehistoric
peoples thought. Testable inferences based on
rigorously derived scientific data are the only acceptable
approach.
2. Cognitive archaeology does not depend on literary
sources for its validity, no matter how important
documentary evidence is in the overall scheme of
reconstructing past ways of thinking. It is true that
prehistoric cognition leaves no direct trace, per se, in the
ground. But proxy measures of cognition – including
evidence for measurement, planning, means of
organization and power, cult activity, and the whole field
of artistic depiction – certainly give the archaeologist
ample evidence for complex patterns of human thought,
even without the benefits of a literary record.
For more information on biomolecular approaches to
understanding the origins of human language, see:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7886477.stm
By way of introduction to the topic of human identity, see:
Gazzaniga, M. S. (2008). HUMAN: The Science
Behind what Makes us Unique. New York:
HarperCollins/Ecco.