Current issues on Archaeological theory

Current Issues in Archaeological Theory

                                                          

Written Account

Topic 3: Cognitive Archaeology

Cognitive archaeology is “the archaeology of the mind”, especially of the ancient mind as it is seen from the title of Renfrew and Zubrow’s important book. Renfrew describes it as “the study of the ways of thought of past societies (and sometimes of individuals in those societies) based upon the surviving material remains” (1993, 248). The reason that Renfrew focuses on the material remains is his critique of the post processual archaeology. In the opening essay of The Ancient Mind, he evaluates the archaeological history. According to him, for years, archaeologists speculated about the past beliefs and thoughts very freely until the New Archaeology which brought a stricter methodology and a more scientific character. Processual theorists later tried to make the observations more positivist yet focused only to the economic and technical aspects of human life, disregarding, or, at least, paying less attention to the cognitive aspect, such as belief systems, ideologies, and symbolisms. This aspect was left for the observation of the palaeopsychology. Renfrew names this as the functional processual tendency. The post processuals, who regarded themselves as a new school of archaeology criticized the purely positivist of the processuals and they employed a hermeneutic and interpretive approach. They focused on meaning of the archaeological material and the symbols of human cognition they pursued through them. For Renfrew, this was a meta-archaeology rather than applied archaeology and since they are relativist, he calls them as the anti-processuals (1994, 3).  Instead of this idealist approach, Renfrew offers cognitive archaeology which follows from where processual archaeology left and which amends the criticisms that post processuals and Renfrew made about them. Cognitive archaeology is a synthesis of the scientific aspect of processualism and the philosophical stance of the cognitive approach. He says, “here we are instead concerned further to develop an approach, which will, so far as possible, use the existing methods of archaeological inquiry to investigate the early use of the symbols and the development of cognitive processes” (1994, 4).

Renfrew proposes the use of inference to understand how people used their minds in the early societies. The best place to look for an answer to this is the symbols used by those people. He categorizes how these symbols were used in his essay in six titles: design (coherently structured, purposive behavior), planning (time scheduling and schema), measurement (devices and units), social relations (to regulate interpersonal behavior) supernatural (symbols to mediate between the human and the world beyond) and representation (depictions and embodiments of reality). 

Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus employ a similar categorization of symbols into their description of the approach in their clear essay “Cognitive Archaeology”.  Cognitive archaeology is an approach which is concerned with the aspects of ancient human mind and its products. The four main categories they propose are cosmology (perception of the universe by people), religion (perception of the supernatural), ideology (principles), and iconography (representation of human values). Here they exclude all subsistence and settlement behaviors claming that otherwise, there would be no difference between cognitive archaeology and archaeology.

One last example to categorization of cognition from the articles we have read is Hodder’s, which is critical of the approach, too. Hodder distinguishes three types of cognition. These are language-like processes in which the signs and symbols are developed in order to communicate; practical knowledge which has to do with technical improvement and its conveyance to the new generations; and finally the archaeologist’s own cognition of the past and how he or she organizes the knowledge. Therefore, in Hodder’s article we see that cognitive archaeology has the risk of being relativist and subjective, too. Because we can say that the final product of the archaeologist will not only reflect the past people’s cognition but also that of the archaeologist. (1993, 255-256)

However, an answer to this criticism comes from another article from the same journal, that of Flannery and Marcus. They definitely state that cognitive archaeology should not be formed as a separate branch of archaeology, because if it becomes so, it risks to slip from scientific discipline to the archaeologist’s mental fantasies and even to charlatanism. According to them, the task of the cognitive archaeology must be the task of the “well-rounded archaeologist” who wants to add a holistic dimension to his or her work besides strengthening the products that are drawn from the data and the evidence. Besides, while defending the cognitive approach, Flannery and Marcus recognize why many of the processual archaeologists view the cognitive approach with skepticism and that there must be some limits to its application: that is, the cognitive approach can be used only when there is a body of data rich enough to support it. If the background information to support the inferences from the symbols are lacking, then the cognitive reconstruction would be nothing but “science fiction”. It would turn into speculation, and “an esoteric subdivision”. (1993, 267)

            Renfrew gives some examples to how the data would be rich enough to support the cognitive approach for the case of religion in his essay “The Archaeology of Religion”. He gives 17 indicators of ritual under 4 subtitles, respectively the focusing of attention (about detecting the relation of a place or building to ritual), boundary zone between this world und the next (about the indicators of sacredness such as cleanliness or the abundance of public display), presence of the deity (cult images, representations or ritualistic symbols) and participation and offering (sacrifice, food and drink residues or offerings). Yet, he also states that even these indicators are not definitely pointing at the existence of a religion and therefore alongside with these numerous physical evidence, the observation should also be free of a terrestrial element, taking many different data from the similar places from a larger geography. Otherwise the function of the site or the place may be concluded subjectively. He ends his essay at a problematic position asking what is “the extent to which evidence from different sites may justifiably be brought together under simultaneous consideration to provide a corpus material sufficient to allow of systematic analysis” (53). Besides, Renfrew also talks about the “play” which can have the same indicators yet have nothing to do with rituals or religion. Therefore, the question of how a scientific method can be applied to a cognitive faculty, or how ideology, philosophy or beliefs can be drawn from archaeological artifacts remains as a challenge for the cognitive archaeologist. As Zubrow writes in the concluding article in The Ancient Mind, the archaeologist should ask fundamental questions about what it means to be human in order to answer more technical questions about the methodology or the approach.