Cognitive Archaeology (Other Keyword)

1-4 (4 Records)

Assessing Hominin Cognitive Evolution through Problem-Solution Distance Modeling: A Case Study Based on Acheulean Technology at Olduvai Gorge (Northern Tanzania) (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Carmen Martin-Ramos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Stone tool making has proven to be essential in human evolution and evolutionary cognitive archaeology studies (Herzlinger et al. 2017; Martín-Ramos 2022; Martín-Ramos and Steele 2023). In the case of the Acheulean technocomplex, concepts such as innovation, imposition of arbitrary form, and artifact variability have been linked to cognitive traits such as...


Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem (2021)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Ross Pain. Anton Killin.

This is an abstract from the "Inference in Paleoarchaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cognitive archaeology faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from...


Haunted Paquimé and the Creation of a Magical Community (2024)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Todd VanPool. Christine VanPool. Brandon Massullo.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human cognition both enables and limits the ways humans can interact with spirits and forces that are typically unseen or that otherwise transcend the physical world. Research in psychology, anthropology, and related fields indicates that social and physical contexts are central to activating the cognitive frameworks that facilitate spirit-human...


Performativity and Pedagogy: the Effect of Verbal and Nonverbal Instruction on Experimental Acheulian Handaxe Symmetry (2015)
DOCUMENT Citation Only Emma Dellopoulos. Shelby Putt.

The Acheulian techno-complex is comprised mostly of bifacal handaxes, which became increasingly symmetrical through time, especially after 400kya. Symmetry has recently been considered a highly significant aspect of the Acheulian toolkit. It has many potential opportunities for a better understanding of the evolution of cognition in early Homo; however, little is known about how this complex skill was transmitted. Could the increasing symmetry of handaxes in the archaeological record be evidence...