Cognitive Archeology

How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement represents a synthesis of the positions that the author, Lambros Malafouris, has developed over the course of his career, supplemented by the addition of new explanatory examples and unpublished chapters. The main objective of the book is to provide a unitary account of material engagement theory, the actual keystone that binds the multiple streams of argument presented by the author in his previous works. The book is organized in three main sections, which respectively take into account epistemological aspects, theoretical tenets, and empirical applications of material engagement theory. A large part of the pars destruens within the book is dedicated to undermining the foundations of a mentalistic and internalist perspective in both cognitive archaeology and philosophical anthropology.

Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one's own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultural and cognitive evolution. Weapons reflect the organizational and technical capabilities of cultures, indicating special cognitive capacities bound up with the abstract anticipation of enemies as well as the ability to produce mental models of complex adversarial entities. At the same time, weapons relay intercultural and internal selection pressures by playing a decisive role in the processes of general technological and organizational innovation. This innovation also influences the formation of practices, norms, motives and self-images. As such, weapons technology concretizes an integral principle governing cultural evolution and civilizational history.

Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one's own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultur...

Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one’s own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultural a...

Evolutionary cognitive archaeology (ECA) is an emerging discipline that attempts to reconstruct the properties of ancient cognitive systems from the study of the material remains found in the archaeological record. Although there has been substantial interest in this area in recent years, scholars have tended to pay little attention to the methodologies used to formulate their theories. This has fostered an unfortunate situation of incommensurability between competing lines of argument. In this paper, I will attempt to provide a way out of this stagnation, using the methodology of “holistic mapping,” which represents a rational tool for theory validation in ECA. The lack of a shared methodology is a symptom of the wider neglect of deeper epistemological aspects of ECA, which in turn has given rise to the even more problematic questioning of the very foundations of the whole ECA enterprise. The absence of direct access to the ancient mind is associated with barriers to empirical testability, which fosters the production of “just so stories,” therefore evoking the specter of relativism. Building upon the previous methodological considerations, I will attempt to defend the epistemic validity of ECA, by discussing how holistic mapping can lead to the acquisition of reliable knowledge even if the object of science can only be indirectly reconstructed. Firmer epistemological foundations for ECA will be established by contextualizing this methodology within a middle-ground position in archaeological theory defined as “realism.” This epistemological perspective allows rejecting both the narrow empiricism and corrosive relativism currently threatening ECA.