AA VV - Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology - Oxford University Press (2017)
AA VV - Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology - Oxford University Press (2017)
AA VV - Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology - Oxford University Press (2017)
Introduction
What is that thing we call “mind” in the archaeology of mind? What is “cogni-
tive” about cognitive archaeology? The reason questions of that sort are usually
neglected is because we take them for granted. We take them for granted not
because we have the answers or because we think they are trivial. Rather, we take
them for granted because we feel that answering those questions is not really
our job. We trust that it is the responsibility of other, maybe better equipped,
disciplines like philosophy, psychology, or neuroscience to define and demarcate
the cognitive. The job of archaeology is to adopt this preformed experimental
or theoretical construct and apply it to the material record of the past. Our job
is not to question the construct or to test it against our findings; rather, it is to
see what we can learn about its evolution or how it can help us explain some
aspects of the archaeological record. Of course, all that makes very good sense.
It is inevitable and necessary that cognitive archaeology must draw on and
work closely with cognitive sciences. Cognitive archaeology is cognitive science
or it is nothing. But there are also some hidden caveats. Every time we borrow
concepts, models, and assumptions from other disciplines we should not for-
get that, for the majority of them, figuring out how the mind works has always
been more important than figuring out how it got to be here. Moreover, words
like “material culture” don’t even exist in their vocabulary. In contrast, cognitive
archaeology has an epistemic obligation to the study of materiality and of long-
term change. Importantly, it might well be that understanding how the mind got
to be here could help us understand how it actually works. Failure to prioritize
and respect those distinctive epistemic features of cognitive archaeology need-
lessly restricts our ability of theorizing, it undermines the empirical status and
the explanatory power of the archaeological record, and it may also deny the
69
70
These are but a few representative ongoing research projects that speak of
the vitality and expanding nature of ECA. However, in spite of all this progress
and multiplicity of perspectives, I sense that ECA struggles in coming to terms
with the nature of mental action and the way in which the structure of the envi-
ronment where action occurs and the range of material and semiotic resources
available figure into its organization. A simple review of the literature from the
past three decades or so will reveal a persistent epistemological anxiety over the
boundaries of mind and the existence of a huge ontological gap separating cog-
nition, action, and materiality. I believe the main source of this anxiety is well
known and comes from the following assumption that all cognitive archaeolo-
gists share: we cannot dig up minds. Archaeology can only have empirical access
to the material products or the behavioral remains of past minds (which also
explains the need to provide bridging arguments between the archaeological
record and psychological models).
Where is that mind that we cannot excavate? Everyone will recognize, for
instance, that tool-making and -using is something we do; namely, a physical act.
However, when it comes to understanding its mental components, we immedi-
ately assume that this is something that happens within us, specifically in our
heads. As a result, we perceive the mental and the physical component of every
act of making as two different things that happen at slightly different times
in different locations, with the former always causing the latter. This assump-
tion is so deeply entrenched it blinds us to any alternative conceptualization.
The accumulating literature on early bodily ornamentation by means of body
painting and shell beads provides another classical example of this tendency,
one where the focus on the putative symbolic dimension of those artifacts and
practices very often disregards the bodily activities producing and the bodily and
social skills enabling them. Instead, mentalist models and symbol-based inter-
pretations have become the norm, as if meaning in the specific case could have
been expressed or constituted by other than bodily and material means (but see;
Garofoli, 2014; Iliopoulos, 2015; Malafouris, 2008a).
I am afraid that by neglecting ontology we have weakened the epistemo-
logical basis of cognitive archaeology and the unique explanatory power of the
archaeological record. This neglect has been intensely damaging to archaeologi-
cal understanding of human cognitive becoming, maybe more damaging than
the difficulties and restrictions posed by the paucity of the archaeological and
fossil record.
In searching this volume for new “formal cognitive models,” we risk repeat-
ing that old mistake. Thus, my aim in this chapter is to try flesh out a possible
alternative that argues against this separatist logic that clearly prioritizes the
brain as the seat of mental life. The material engagement approach (Malafouris,
2013) that I advocate insists, on the one hand, that the brain can only be under-
stood as one element of a larger intelligent bodily system that incorporates
72
material culture and, on the other hand, that, contrary to what many archaeolo-
gists think, the physical location and ontology of human intelligence remains an
open question (see Figure 4.1).
So far as the discussion of “formal cognitive models” is concerned, this chap-
ter will focus specifically on embodied cognitive science, which has become one
of the foremost areas of study and research, with a variety of applications from
the study of perception and language to the study of social cognition, emotion,
consciousness, memory, and learning and development (see Shapiro, 2014). Not
surprisingly, the label embodied cognition (EC) is typically used to refer to a vari-
ety of theories, some of which are more radical than others. As a result, despite
the growing contemporary interest in EC, many unresolved problems remain,
and there is little agreement about just what it means to say that the body shapes
the mind (Gallagher, 2005; Kiverstein, 2012). There are several important ques-
tions and potential caveats that I will try to address.
One question concerns what is meant by “body” here. I will argue that if
notions of embodiment are to have any real explanatory value, they ought to
mean something different from the brain. This is not because the brain is not an
inseparable part of the body; rather, it is because if, in our discussion of embodi-
ment, we allow the brain to qualify as part of the body we run the risk of trivial-
izing the claim that the body is crucial to mental life and we end up with some
version of brain identity theory (Goldman & de Vignemont, 2009, p. 154). What
I call “embodied cognitivism,” namely, the limited view of embodied mind as
somehow contained, localized in, caused by, or identifiable with the brain must
be overcome. The embodied mind must be more than a brain or it is an empty
concept. This last point is worth stressing.
Another basic question in this context concerns the nature of the contri-
bution of the body to cognition and about whether this contribution can be
accounted for by way of classical computational models or whether something
more radical is needed. More important for my purpose in this chapter is the
question of material culture fits into this emerging picture of EC. The most com-
mon view of extended, embodied, and distributed cognition is the one largely
compatible with computational functionalism, where external representational
elements are taken to be constitutive components of the cognitive architecture,
given their ability to implement and facilitate (by means of external storage and
distribution) information processing. It is necessary when we speak of embodi-
ment as the condition of cognitive extension by means of external represen-
tations to clarify some important, often implicit, distinctions, such as those
between derived and nonderived content and between causal influence and con-
stituency (Wheeler, 2014, p. 378).
Viewed from the perspective of material engagement theory (MET), some
meanings and uses of the term “embodied and extended mind” are certainly
more helpful than others. One of my aims in this chapter is also to clarify the
meaning that the notion of EC has in the context of MET (Malafouris, 2013).
I will differentiate “weak” embodiment from “hard” or “radical” embodiment and
argue that the material engagement approach subscribes to the latter version,
according to which cognition is grounded in situated action and constrained
by the specific kind of body we possess. It is important to clarify here that the
meaning of the term “body,” far from reductive and fixed, refers to the details
of bodily implementation (neural and extraneural) and action-taking potentials
because those can be determined by the nature of local interactions, cultural
practices, and prostheses. The latter goes against the functionalist claim (often
implicit in some versions of extended mind theories) that the same kind of cog-
nitive process or state can be realized in different kinds of bodies or material
instantiations. In contrast to the functionalist principle of multiple realisability
(for some, the key premise of artificial intelligence or AI), for MET, different
kinds of bodies/embodiment equal different kinds of minds. MET insists that
only a thorough reconfiguration of the relation between cognition and mate-
rial culture can provide cognitive archaeology, and by extension cognitive sci-
ence, with a feasible alternative framework to battle the cognitivism of classical
evolutionary psychology. The organism’s worldly engagements become the new
analytical unit for the study of mind. Material engagement constitutes a level of
analysis not reducible to the individual. The chapter ends with some comments
74
load and thus frees speakers’ cognitive resources to perform other tasks (e.g.,
memory tasks; Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Goldin-Meadow & Wagner 2005, 238).
Moreover, the so-called embodied simulation theories have been trying to
ground language in bodily states and action by arguing that concepts directly
evoke action information (Gallese & Lakoff, 2005). For instance, listening to
sentences that describe actions engages the visuomotor circuits that subserve
action execution and observation (Tettamanti et al., 2005). Simulation theories
see the offline recruitment of the same neural networks involved in perception
and action (e.g., Jeannerod, 2007) as a form of embodiment. That is why gestures
had been described in this context as “visible embodiments” of internal simula-
tions (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008). In short, language and thought processes are
dependent on the brain recruiting sensorimotor representations/activations.2
The preceding studies offer a representative sample of “simple embodiment.”
Notice that there are two underlying assumptions here: first, that since gestures
and speech are part of the same cognitive source, the former can provide a win-
dow on the hidden inner mental operations of the later. Second, that gestures
and bodily movements only execute already preformed sensorimotor neural
instructions and thus they appear to be cognitively trivial (Pouw, De Nooijer,
Van Gog, Zwaan, & Paas, 2014; Radford, 2009).3
Those weak perspectives on EC can be useful when it comes to understanding
the links between high-level cognitive processes and low-level bodily experiences in
the brain, but they also serve to reiterate and hide the traditional drawbacks of cog-
nitivism. Specifically, they create the illusion that EC and classical representational
cognitive science are compatible and subject to limited adjustments (e.g., the recog-
nition of the importance of organism’s sensory–motor experience, which nonethe-
less become realized by means of neuronal representations). I am not saying that the
embedding of cognitive processes in brain circuitry is wrong, as long as one specifies
what this embedding means and how it relates to the body and the material world.
The hand and the brain interact, and to reduce the action of the former to the latter
is to miss the very point of introducing the term of “embodied cognition.”
Examples of simple embodiment abound in cognitive archaeology, with
the majority of researchers still relying heavily on representational and com-
putational neo-evolutionary psychological assumptions that effectively isolate
and prioritize hominin brain evolution over the body and the material record.
Attention to the roles of embodied action and material culture, in such cases, is
merely a means of testing ready-made psychological and, more recently, neuro-
scientific constructs and models against the archaeological record.
Take, for instance, the example of tool use and manufacture. Obviously, it
makes little sense to account for the evolutionary and ontogenetic significance
of tool use on the basis of a disembodied view of mind. And yet this is precisely
what is happening in the majority of studies where the focus on embodied and
76
situated aspects of action is not aiming to understand how the body moves and
thinks in order to elevate its importance in explaining the nature and origins
of human cognitive activities and higher cognitive functions. The underlying
assumption remains that mental operations are located inside the head in the
classical computational fashion, largely detached from the workings of the body
that no doubt they move and control. As a result, concern with bodily action
and skill simply provides an additional empirical constraint for understanding
the origins and transformation of those predefined inner representational and
neural structures. In other words, bodily experience and gesture are important
not in themselves but only when they contribute to an account about the inner
representational realm.
Is there another way to understand the cognitive life of gestures as embodied
physical acts? Can it be argued that bodily gestures are able to realize or provide
material vehicles for cognitive processes (Wheeler, 2013, p. 269)? I argue that
tools and the embodied acts that their use and manufacture affords and invites
are not simply the products of mental action but also central to the organiza-
tion and constitution of action. This brings us to the second, stronger version of
embodiment dubbed “radical embodiment.”
through the stone. We need to replace this internalist and inherently dualis-
tic vision of projective mentality with an enactive, distributed, and inherently
dynamic vision of participatory mentality. This is what the material engagement
approach does. Thus, unlike the great majority of approaches to the study of
human cognitive evolution that remain committed to representationalist think-
ing, MET subscribes to a process ontology of material culture and thus to an
anti-representationalist enactive conception of EC (Gosden & Malafouris, 2015;
Hutto & Myin, 2013).
In the previous sections, we have seen what embodiment brings to the study
of cognition. We have also discussed the radical view of embodiment that the
material engagement approach adopts. In the last part of the chapter, I want to
examine the implications and scope of EC for ECA.
becomes the most efficient strategy for enhancing human memory and extend-
ing the amount of thoughts to be consciously entertained, as well as the manner
by which they become attended in a variety of media.
This is also why I believe that notions like the “modern mind” or “behavioral
modernity” are so unhelpful, if not entirely misleading. Maybe a few decades ago
they offered cognitive archaeology a focal point for organizing the complexities
and irregularities of the early archaeological record. These notions are now obso-
lete and should be abandoned. Cognitive archaeology has matured and needs
a more sophisticated and precise theoretical vocabulary. To this end, current
debates and theorizing in fields like semiotics, philosophy of mind, and material
culture studies might be especially useful.
In any case, what it is important to clarify here is that neither MET nor radical
embodied cognitive science are compatible with the notion of “cognitive moder-
nity” or the foundational premises of current neo-Darwinian thinking in archae-
ology and beyond. Having said that, I also want to argue that MET is largely
complementary to, and in some instances builds on, contemporary accounts in
ECA that, although they make use and refer to those notions, do so for the sake
of established convention (and maybe also for the sake of implicit how-to-get-
published norms) rather than any explicit commitment to what those notions
really stand for or imply about the shape of human evolution and the nature
of human cognition. It is important to realize, if cognitive archaeology in gen-
eral and ECA in particular is to become an active contributor into the sciences
of mind, that different disciplines aim at answering different kind of questions
using different methods and data. As archaeologists, we have responsibility to
make the best use of what we have, respecting the properties of material culture
and constructing our own theories and epistemic practices.
I argued previously that a common conservative tendency in the study of
embodiment is that of retaining the idea of computation at its heart but opening
up space for the possibility that the body (and by extension the environment)
can also potentially implement information processing. I have shown that this
conservative tendency or strategy, although appealing from a “unified” embod-
ied cognitive science perspective, has a number of problems. For those who
still would like to retain a computational outlook, preferring or finding more
productive the epistemic tidiness of simple embodiment over the ontological
messiness of the radical embodiment advanced in MET, I have a simple piece
of advice: cognitive processes realized by acting human bodies, working in con-
cert and engaging the material world, unlike algorithmic disembodied processes
realized by computing machines, have a natural tendency to flow through what-
ever material in which it is cheaper to implement them (cf. Kirsh, 2010, p. 442).
Now it is well known that neural tissue has always been a particularly expensive
commodity in the exchange market of human evolution.4 One could certainly
hypothesize that growing our expensive neural tissue must have happened for a
81
good reason, but before we even begin to calculate what humanity gained from
this extra neural tissue, we need to recognize that those exchange energetic net-
works are far too dynamic and complex to be expressed as simple correlations of
increased hominid brain size with social complexity like the social brain hypoth-
esis or technology. In other words, given the energetic challenges that a larger,
hungry brain poses and how metabolically demanding neural tissue activity can
be, when it comes to locating the boundaries of mind very often it pays to aban-
don our popular intuitions about our big brains as the natural locus of what
we refer to as intelligence and instead simply follow the materials and bodies
attached to those brains (see also Chemero, 2009, p. 177) when trying to figure
out their cognitive ecology and affordances.
What this means very simply is that, when hypothesizing about the possible
evolutionary pressures for encephalization, the cost and benefits, the various
tradeoffs, and the effects that they have in human life and cognitive evolution,
we need to recognize their plastic qualities and situated character. This is rarely
an intracranial affair that takes place inside us; rather, it is invariably an extra-
cranial affair that incorporates material and bodily techniques realized in devel-
opmental time and social space.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding its long history in the philosophy of mind, the relationship
between mind and body, also known as the mind–body problem, is also implicit
in the archaeology of mind, constantly challenging our ways of thinking about
cognitive evolution. Although the substance dualism between an immaterial
mind and a material body has long been rejected, elements of the Cartesian doc-
trine are still visible. Within cognitive archaeology, the dominant reductionist
picture of cognitive explanation remains one that renders ontological suprem-
acy to the brain and seeks to account for the observed changes in size, shape,
and neural complexity by means of their possible material and behavioral cor-
relates as these can be found in the archaeological record.
Moreover, cognitive archaeology is often understood as the study of the
long-term changes in the capacity of the brain to build, store, and manipulate
“inner” or “mental” representations of an “external” material world. Put simply,
observed changes in the material record are simply seen as potential indirect
sources of information about cognitive changes and processes performed solely
in the head. Computational formal psychological models are extensively used to
account for those changes in human cognitive evolution. Since most archaeolo-
gists are not familiar with the underlying representational assumptions of the
models they borrow from psychology and cognitive science, they commit their
accounts, without even noticing, to classical disembodied internalism.
82
Seen in this light, the meaning of EC in the context of MET is not signifying
a simple shift from the disembodied computational image of mind to one that is
now grounded in neural structures and brain networks. It is also not associated
with a view of the mind as existing within the body’ interior. Rather, it signi-
fies that the details of embodiment and thus of action, situation, and media-
tion matter. Embodiment is the precondition for material engagement and vice
versa. Taken together, the two processes explain the dynamical nature and vari-
ety of forms that human mental processes can take and how they connect to the
world they are about. Thus, it no longer makes any sense to separate an “inner”
domain of mentality from an “outer” domain of materiality. Rather, cognition
involves and emerges from situated dynamic interactions between different
types of materials and activities. It is also important not to confuse symmetry
for equality. The fact that a variety of material extraneural resources (bodily,
artifactual, or semiotic) contribute to human cognition also implies that, given
the unique properties of each material resource, they will make a separate and
distinct contribution. Embodiment is what brings those diverse resources and
their properties together to form what we define as the human mind.
For all those reasons, embodiment demands a different approach, one sensi-
tive to all those experiential, ecological, and phenomenological dimensions that
are very hard to elucidate on the basis of archaeological data. Those questions are
important not because we can answer them; instead, they are important because
they remind us—not just archaeology but the broader community of cogni-
tive science—how little we know still about the cognitive ecologies of human
becoming. This epistemic awareness is important for two main reasons: first,
it protects cognitive archaeology from the ghosts of “modernity”; and, second,
it opens the way for a thorough redefinition of the archaeology of mind as a
field of comparative critical discourse on human becoming. Cognitive archaeol-
ogy is about the past as much as it is an archaeology of mind in the present.
This is not because past and present minds are the same but because they are
different. However, this variability preserves sufficient elements of continuity
to be comparable. I am not talking about genetic or Darwinian continuities here
but instead of developmental continuities of embodiment, action, and material
engagement. This is also why, I have come to believe, the archaeology of mind is
not the study of how we became human; instead, it is the study of human becom-
ing. The former implies that being human is a stage we reached in the past. The
84
latter, in contrast, speaks of an ongoing process that extends very much into the
present. I contend that the human mind is precisely that: becoming. The mind
is not a product but a process (Gosden & Malafouris, 2015; Malafouris, 2015;
Malafouris & Renfrew, 2010). The only sense in which popular notions like that
of the “psychic unity” of humankind could be retained is if, contrary to their
current use, they explicitly refer to the only true universal of human nature and
the human mind—its continual openness to change and alterability by incor-
porating new means of material engagement (see also Wheeler & Clark, 2008).
To understand how human beings came to think in the ways that they do, we
need a comparative anthropology of what Richard Sennett (2008) in his book
The Craftsman describes as “material consciousness.” I call it “tectonoetic aware-
ness” (Malafouris, 2008b). This is the kind of consciousness that archaeologists
can excavate.
Author Note
Correspondence concerning this research should be addressed to Lambros
Malafouris, Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, 36 Beaumont Str,
Oxford, OX1 2PG. Email: lambros.malafouris@keble.ox.ac.uk
Notes
1. As Varela et al. (1991) well pointed out: “Baldly stated, representationalism in cognitive sci-
ence is the precise homologue of adaptationism in evolutionary theory, for optimality plays
the same central role in each domain” (p. 194).
2. Michael Corballis (2003, 2009) has made a strong case for the evolution of language as a
gestural system evolving from the so-called mirror system in the primate brain.
3. As Pouw et al. (2014) rightly observe: “current perspectives on gestures are still disembodied
and too internalistic because they seem to implicitly reduce gestures to cognitively trivial
bodily outputs of (sensorimotor) neural precursors” (emphasis in original, 2014, p. 1).
4. One famous early example of such an exchange is the shrinking of the gut in return for a
larger brain (Aiello & Wheeler 1995; Allen 2009).
5. The paradox is that the moment you become truly un-Cartesian you can be accused of being
anti-Darwinian.
References
Aiello, L., & P. Wheeler (1995). The expensive-tissue hypothesis: The brain and the digestive sys-
tem in human and primate evolution. Current Anthropology, 36(2), 199–221.
Allen, J. S. (2009). The lives of the brain: Human evolution and the organ of mind. Boston, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. National Review of
Neuroscience, 4(10), 829–839.
85
Barrett, J. C. (2013). The archaeology of mind: It’s not what you think. Cambridge Archaeological
Journal, 23(01), 1–17.
Best, J. R. (2010). Effects of physical activity on children’s executive function: Contributions of
experimental research on aerobic exercise. Developmental Review, 30(4), 331–351.
Best, J. R. (2012). Exergaming immediately enhances children’s executive functioning.
Developmental Psychology, 48(5), 1501–1510.
Blair, C., & Razza, R. P. (2008). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief
understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Developmental
Psychology, 78(2), 647–663.
Bril, B., Roux, V., & Dietrich, G. (2005). Stone knapping: Khambhat (India), a unique oppor-
tunity? In V. Roux & B. Bril (Eds.), Stone knapping: The necessary conditions for a uniquely
hominin behavior (pp. 53– 72). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological
Research.
Bruner, E. (2003). Fossil traces of the human thought: Paleoneurology and the evolution of the
genus Homo. Rivista di Antropologia: Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 81, 29–56.
Bruner, E. (2004). Geometric morphometrics and paleoneurology: Brain shape evolution in the
genus Homo. Journal of Human Evolution, 47, 279–303.
Bruner, E., & Lozano, M. (2014). Extended mind and visuo-spatial integration: three hands for
the Neandertal lineage. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 92, 273–280.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1999). An embodied cognitive science? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3(9), 345–351.
Clark, A. (2013). Gesture as thought. In Z. Radman (Ed.), The hand, an organ of the mind: What the
manual tells the mental (pp. 255–268). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2001). Executive functions of the frontal lobes and the evolutionary
ascendancy of Homo sapiens. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 11(02), 255–260.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2005). Working memory, its executive functions, and the emergence
of modern thinking. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 15(01), 5–26.
Coolidge, F. L., & Wynn, T. (2009). The rise of Homo sapiens: The evolution of modern thinking.
Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Corballis, M. C. (2003). From hand to mouth: The origins of language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Corballis, M. C. (2009). The evolution of language. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
1156(1), 19–43.
Davidson, I., & Noble, W. (1989). The archaeology of perception: Traces of depiction and lan-
guage. Current Anthropology, 30(2), 125–155.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The brain’s concepts: The role of the sensory-motor system in
reason and language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(3–4), 455–479.
Gamble, C. S., Gowlett, J. A. J., & Dunbar, R. (2011). The social brain and the shape of the
Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 21(01), 115–135.
Garofoli, D. (2014). Do early body ornaments prove cognitive modernity? A critical analysis from
situated cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1–23.
Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Wagner, S. M. (2005). How our hands help us learn.Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 9(5), 234–241.
Goldman, A., & de Vignemont, F. (2009). Is social cognition embodied? Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 13(4), 154–159.
Gosden, C., & Malafouris, L. (2015). Process archaeology (P-Arch). World Archaeology, 47(5),
701–717.
Gowlett, J. A. J., Gamble, C. S., & Dunbar, R. (2012). Human evolution and the archaeology of the
social brain. Current Anthropology, 53(6), 693–722.
86
Haidle, M. N. (2010). Working-memory capacity and the evolution of modern cognitive potential.
Current Anthropology, 51(S1), S149–S166.
Haidle, M. N. (2014). Building a bridge—an archeologist’s perspective on the evolution of causal
cognition. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1472), 1–15.
Hostetter, A. B., & Alibali, M. W. (2008). Visible embodiment: Gestures as simulated action.
Psychonomic Bulletin Review, 15(3), 495–514.
Hutto, D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Iliopoulos, A. (2015). The material dimensions of signification: Rethinking the nature and emer-
gence of semiosis in the debate on human origins. Quaternary International (in press).
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. J. (2005). Evolution in four dimensions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jeannerod, M. (2007). Motor cognition: What actions tell the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kirsh, D. (2010). Thinking with external representations. AI and Society, 25(4), 441–454.
Kiverstein, J. (2012). The meaning of embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(4), 740–758.
Krauss, R. M., Chen, Y., & Gottesmann, R. F. (2000). Lexical gestures and lexical access: A pro-
cess model. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and Gesture (pp. 261–283). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Laland, K. N., J. Odling-Smee, and M. W. Feldman. (2000). Niche construction, and cultural
change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23: 131–146.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lombard, M., & Haidle, M. N. (2012). Thinking a bow-and-arrow set: Cognitive implications of
middle stone age bow and stone-tipped arrow technology. Cambridge Archaeological Journal,
22(02), 237–264.
Malafouris, L. (2004). The cognitive basis of material engagement: Where brain, body and cul-
ture conflate. In E. DeMarrais, C. Gosden & C. Renfrew (Eds.), Rethinking materiality: The
engagement of mind with the material world (pp. 53–62). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research.
Malafouris, L. (2008a). At the potter’s wheel: An argument for material agency. In C. Knappett &
L. Malafouris (Eds.), Material agency: Towards a non-anthropocentric perspective (pp. 19–36).
New York: Springer.
Malafouris, L. (2008b). Between brains, bodies and things: Tectonoetic awareness and the
extended self. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1499),
1993–2002.
Malafouris, L. (2010). Metaplasticity and the human becoming: Principles of neuroarchaeology.
Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 88(4), 49–72.
Malafouris, L. (2012). Prosthetic gestures: How the tool shapes the mind. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences, 35(04), 230–231.
Malafouris, L. (2013). How things shape the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Malafouris, L. (2015). Metaplasticity and the primacy of material engagement. Time and Mind,
8(4), 351–371.
Malafouris, L., & Renfrew, C. (2008). Introduction. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18(03),
381–385
Malafouris, L., & Renfrew, C. (2010). The cognitive life of things: Archaeology, material engage-
ment and the extended mind. The cognitive life of things: Recasting the boundaries of the
mind, 1–12.
Nonaka, T., Bril, B., & Rein, R. (2010). How do stone knappers predict and control the outcome
of flaking? Implications for understanding early stone tool technology. Journal of Human
Evolution, 59(2), 155–167.
Penfield, W., & Rasmussen, T. (1950). The cerebral cortex of man; a clinical study of localization of
function. London: Macmillan.
Pouw, W. T., De Nooijer, J. A., Van Gog, T., Zwaan, R. A., & Paas, F. (2014). Toward a more embed-
ded/extended perspective on the cognitive function of gestures. Frontiers in Psychology, 5.
Radford, L. (2009). Why do gestures matter? Sensuous cognition and the palpability of math-
ematical meanings. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 70(2), 111–126.
87
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2008). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Understanding cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sennett, R. (2008).The craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Shapiro, L. (2010). Embodied cognition. New York: Routledge.
Shapiro, L. (Ed.). (2014). The Routledge handbook of embodied cognition. New York: Routledge.
Sterelny, K. (2003). Thought in a hostile world: The evolution of human cognition.
New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Stout, D., & Chaminade, T. (2007). The evolutionary neuroscience of tool making.
Neuropsychologia, 45(5), 1091–1100.
Stout, D., Toth, N., Schick, K., & Chaminade, T. (2008). Neural correlates of Early Stone Age tool-
making: Technology, language and cognition in human evolution. Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 1939–1949.
Streeck, J. (2009). Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning (Vol. 2). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tettamanti, M., Buccino, G., Saccuman, M. C., Gallese, V., Danna, M., Scifo, P., … Perani, D.
(2005). Listening to action- related sentences activates fronto- parietal motor circuits.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(2), 273–281.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human
experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wheeler, M. (2005). Reconstructing the cognitive world: The next step. MIT press.
Wheeler, M. (2013). Is cognition embedded or extended? The case of gestures. In Z. Radman (Ed.),
The hand, an organ of the mind: What the manual tells the mental (pp. 269–301). Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wheeler, M. (2014). The future prospects for embodied cognition. In L. Shapiro (Ed.), The
Routledge handbook of embodied cognition. Routledge.
Wheeler, M., & Clark, A. (2008). Culture, embodiment and genes: Unravelling the triple helix.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1509), 3563–3575.
Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625–636.