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:

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
  1. planning, to help us define our intentions more clearly (plans, maps, models are all examples)
  1. to organize and regulate relationships between humans (money, military insignia, etc.)
  1. to regulate human relations with the “Other World” (religion and cult symbolism)
  1. 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 itscoincidental 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.
  1. 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:

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.