Moving toward a Nuanced View of Symbols and Symbolic Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Harold Dibble had strong views about the cognitive abilities and symbolic behavior of premodern humans as he gleaned them from the archaeological record through engravings, ornaments, burials, etc. After publishing a number of papers touching on these issues, mostly in the 1990s, Dibble rarely returned to address such questions in later years. The many changes in the pertinent archaeological record, as well as its underlying paradigms, with new insights from the fields of paleogenetics, new discoveries in the field, modeling of human social behavior (among others), justify explicit rethinking. Taking stock of the current state of knowledge, we endeavor here to present an overview of the empirical database and of prevailing perceptions about the evolution of human symbolic capacities during the Middle and Late Pleistocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Establishing the Science of Paleolithic Archaeology: The Legacy of Harold Dibble (1951–2018) Part II   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35750.0