Studying Cognition In Prehistoric Societies Analysis

Studying Cognition in Prehistoric Societies
1. Unfortunately for archaeologists, Chavín was not a literate culture. Why does literacy provide archaeologists with such an important insight into the cognition of a society?
Symbols of depiction provide us with perhaps our most direct insight into the cognition of an individual or a society for pre-literate periods. Among literate communities, however, written words – those deceptively direct symbols used to describe the world – inevitably dominate the evidence. The locations and dates of the world’s earliest writing systems are summarized on the map below. Ancient literature in all its variety, from poems and plays to political statements and early historical writings, provides rich insights into
All intelligent thought and indeed all coherent speech are based on symbols, for words are themselves symbols, where the sound or the written letters stand for and thus represent (or symbolize) an aspect of the real world. Usually, however, meaning is attributed to a particular symbol in an arbitrary way. And that meaning is specific to a particular cultural tradition. It is usually impossible to infer the meaning of a symbol within a given culture from the symbolic form of the image or object alone. We have to see how that form is used, and to try to understand its meaning from the context in which it is used. Cognitive archaeology has thus to be very careful about specific contexts of discovery. There are very few symbols that have a universal meaning cross-culturally. It is the assemblage that matters, not the individual object in
From the Upper Paleolithic period there are many well-established cases of human burial, where the body or bodies have been deliberately laid to rest within a dug grave, sometimes accompanied by ornaments of personal adornment. Evidence is emerging, however, from even earlier periods. The act of burial itself implies some kind of respect or feeling for the deceased individual, and perhaps some notion of an afterlife (although that point is less easy to demonstrate). The adornment seems to imply the existence of the idea that objects of decoration can enhance the individual’s appearance, whether in terms of beauty or prestige. In assessing such finds, we must be sure to understand the formation processes – in particular what may have happened to the burial after it was made. For example, animal skeletons have been discovered alongside human remains in graves. Traditionally this would have been taken as proof that animals were deliberately buried with the humans as part of some ritual act. t. Now, however, it is thought possible that in certain cases animals scavenging for food found their way into these burials and died accidentally – thus leaving false clues to mislead