Squeezing Minds From Stones : Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind

Abstract

This anthology celebrates 40 years of an archaeology of mind, the investigation of how the modern human mind emerged, as discerned through material artifacts such as the stone tools used throughout the Paleolithic and the hunting technologies and numbers found in the Neolithic. The contributions by established and emerging scholars cover a wide variety of topics in cognitive archaeology, including the evolutionary bases for cognition, how stone tools may reflect the brains and minds of their makers, when and how stone tools move from the practical to the aesthetic, and the social implications of archaeological artifacts and their relationships to attention, language, working memory, materiality, and numbers. The volume concludes with some thoughts by archaeologist Thomas Wynn, one of the field’s most distinguished pioneers, on how cognitive archaeology contributes to our understanding of human cognition and mainstream cognitive science.