Introduction

Cognitive archaeology - the study of past ways of thought as inferred from the material remains - has only recently been investigated in a sustained and systematic way. Until the explicit investigation of the basis for knowledge in archaeology - the epistemology - associated with the ‘new’ or processual archaeology of the 1960s and its aftermath, there were opposing views. Some archaeologists working upon literate culture with a rich iconography often regarded the approach to interpretation as relatively unproblematic (see Interpretive Art and Archaeology; Image and Symbol). On the other hand, prehistorians lacking any rich graphic imagery often regarded the task as prohibitively difficult: in the words of Professor Christopher Hawkes ‘‘To infer to the religious institutions and spiritual life... is the hardest inference of all.’’

The theoretical outlook of processual archaeology brought with it a new optimism (see Processual Archaeology). In 1968, Lewis Binford quoted with approval the words of W. H. Sears:

‘‘With the proper approach it should be possible to discover and document a great deal about social systems and the political and religious organizations for most prehistoric cultures. There must be limits, kinds of information we cannot reconstruct, but until we have tried we shall not know what these limits are.’’

But in practice during the first two decades of proces-sual archaeology, it was the ecological and the social factors which were emphasized. There were few investigations into early symbolism, iconography or religion. Such initiatives were sometimes dismissed, for instance, by Binford, as mere ‘palaeopsychology’. This was an era when processual archaeology was still rather functionalist in nature. It was rather the interests of the ‘postprocessual’ or interpretive archaeologists which emphasized the symbolic, as in Ian Hodder’s Symbols in Action, published in 1982. Others, working in the processual tradition, were already considering the cognitive dimension: Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, in their work on the evolution of urban society in early Oaxaca, Mexico, have consistently argued for what they term a ‘holistic approach’, where functional and symbolic aspects are integrated.

The aspirations of the interpretive archaeologists sometimes exceeded the outcome, however. The criticism that some of their approaches lacked any coherent method was not definitively answered. Indeed the argument of some early ‘postprocessual’ archaeologists that general criteria could not be applied, and that one person’s view was as good as another’s, led to charges of relativism (see Postprocessual Archaeology). The allegation was made that in the interpretationist (or ‘hermeneutic’) mode of reasoning ‘anything goes’.

In recent years the two approaches have converged somewhat, with attempts to develop a more systematic and explicit methodology toward the thought processes underlying human actions. Cognitive-processual archaeologists working in the tradition of proces-sual archaeology have learnt from the explorations of interpretive archaeologists in such fields as gender archaeology, the archaeology of identity, and the use of symbols. New developments in landscape archaeology, laying emphasis upon how the landscape is perceived and understood, have also favored convergent approaches.