Trajectories of development, following the out-of-Africa dispersal, are different in different parts of the world. Speciation is complete: this is now a ‘tectonic’ phase, where communities construct the social worlds in which they live. In many areas the establishment of settled life marks a turning point, with the development of many new forms of symbolic behavior which are represented in the archaeological record. Symbolic behavior, like the use of language itself, is essentially a social activity, and the field of cognitive archaeology can sometimes be seen as the study of symbolic interactions. Man, or humankind, was defined by Leslie White as a ‘symboling animal’. It is possible to think here in terms of a series of categories of symbolic human behavior. Symbols are used to cope with several aspects of existence, all of them finding a place in the archaeological record:
1. design, in the sense of coherently structured, purposive, behavior;
2. planning, involving time scheduling and sometimes the production of a schema prior to carrying out the planned work;
3. measurement, involving devices for measuring, and units of measure;
4. social relations, with the use of symbols to structure and regulate inter-personal behavior;
5. the supernatural, with the use of symbols to communicate with the other world, and to mediate between the human and the world beyond; and
6. representation, with the production and use of depiction or other iconic embodiments of reality.
Each of these represents a different subfield of cognitive archaeology. Of these, the archaeology of religion has been the most intensively studied. Yet for periods and places with a restricted iconography, the task can prove to be a difficult one.
World History
