Thinking, For Example In and About the Past

Abstract

Abstract Can archaeology, seemingly limited to preserved material evidence, reconstruct the cognitive systems and intellectual lives of past peoples? Traditional archaeology viewed this goal as beyond the realistic limits of empirical inference. Ideational cognitive archaeology, explicitly concerned with religious beliefs, symbolic systems, and social and ideological structures of “cognitively modern” humans, has, however, developed analytical techniques allowing us to achieve this level of interpretation. Partly employing the Direct Historical Approach, ideational cognitive archaeology is commonly associated with studies of later prehistoric periods. But it also uses cognitive universals and natural constants and models that sometimes provide analytical bridges to deeper prehistoric times, even back to the Upper Palaeolithic. The rock engravings of the Coso Range, California are a rich symbolic corpus that can be deployed to infer the religious and cognitive systems and social lives of hunter-gatherers who occupied this North American region. A detailed ethnographic record provides a clear understanding of the historical origins and primary meanings of these motifs, which is amplified by explication of the natural models illustrated in the corpus. A neuropsychological model based on cognitive universals further contributes to our understanding of the origin and symbolism of the engravings. These strands of independent evidence, based on both different kinds of data and analytical techniques, result in a scientifically robust interpretation of prehistory in this portion of the Great Basin, demonstrating the utility of ideational cognitive archaeology.

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