The fifteen papers in this volume explore how human beliefs have been externalised and `stored' in material form, thus making very intangible ideas exist in a permanent, tangible form. The volume benefits from a culturally and temporally comparative approach. Contents: Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and external symbolic storage (Colin Renfrew); Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution (Merlin Donald); Palaeolithic origins of artificial memory systems: an evolutionary perspective (Francesco d'Errico); Material artefacts, symbolism, sociologists and archaeologists (David Halle); Mimesis, imagination and role-play (David Harris); Rock art: handmaiden to studies of cognitive evolution (Thomas Dowson); Digging for memes: the role of material objects in cultural evolution (Mark Lake); Personal experience and belief: the significance of external symbolic storage for the emergence of modern human cognition (E J Lowe); The supernatural beings of prehistory and the external storage of religious ideas (Steven Mithen); Chinese burial patterns: sources of information on thought and belief (Jessica Rawson); Social relations and the idea of externality (Marilyn Strathern); Some problems with the notion of external symbolic storage and the case of Neolithic material culture in Britain (Julian Thomas); Symbolic behaviour: the origin of a spatial perspective (Ezra Zubrow and Patrick Daly); Mind and artefact: a dialectical perpsective (Robert Hinde); Material culture and cognition: concluding thoughts (Merlin Donald).
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
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A new approach to cognitive archaeology,
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This review is from: Cognition and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (Monograph Series) (Hardcover)
This book is the archaeologists' response to Merlin Donald's 1991 book, "Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition." Donald's book established a developmental framework for understanding modern human cognition. The final stage, in particular, is of interest to archaeologists. It is this stage, the development of "External Symbolic Storage," which is the focus of the volume edited by Renfrew and Scarre. A chapter by Donald abstracts the ideas from the 1991 book, and expands on them, so a reading of the earlier book is not necessary to appreciate the ideas in this volume (though I would recommend the 1991 book, which is a very interesting read). The other chapters present archaeological examples of "external symbolic storage," ranging from cave art to Chinese burial practices. Archaeologists with an interest in symbols, information storage and retrieval, or memory, will find this book useful and thought-provoking.
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