Cognitive archaeology

Cognitive archaeology is a theoretical perspective in archaeology that focuses on the ancient mind. It is divided into two main groups: evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA), which seeks to understand human cognitive evolution from the material record, and ideational cognitive archaeology (ICA), which focuses on the symbolic structures discernable in or inferable from past material culture. ECA infers change in ancestral human cognition from the archaeological record, often drawing on the theories, methods, and data of other disciplines: cognitive science, comparative cognition, paleoneurology, experimental replication, and hands-on participation in the manufacture and use of traditional technologies. For example, the 3.3-million-year history of stone tool use is broadly informative of change in cognitive capacities like intelligence, spatial reasoning, working memory, and executive functioning, as defined by and understood through cognitive psychology and as operationalized to permit their detection in the archaeological record. Other ECA investigations have focused on the development of domain-specific abilities, including theory of mind, visual perception and visuospatial abilities, technological reasoning, language, numeracy, and literacy. ECA is broadly analogous to Steven Mithen's categories of cognitive-processual and evolutionary-cognitive archaeology. Within ECA, there are two main schools of thought. The North American ECA school began in the mid-1970s with the pioneering work of archaeologist Thomas G. Wynn and biological anthropologist Sue Taylor Parker working with evolutionary neurobiologist Kathleen Gibson. It focuses on understanding human cognitive evolution, either from the artifactual record of forms like stone tools, comparisons of ancestral tool use with that of contemporary species (typically but not exclusively, non-human primates), or both. It often involves descriptive pattern analysis: analyzing change in a form like stone tools over millions of years and interpreting that change in terms of its cognitive significance using theories, constructs, and paradigms from cognitive psychology and neuroscience.