Skip to main content

SAGE Social Science Thesaurus

Search from vocabulary

Concept information

Preferred term

cognitive archaeology  

Definition

  • Cognitive archaeology, or the archaeology of mind, has been broadly defined by Colin Renfrew as the study of past ways of thinking through the material remains of the past. What does this mean? Why ask an archaeologist about the mind? Above all, what is it, specifically, that archaeology can bring to the study of mind and human cognitive evolution? Two major points may be made by way of answer: First, as our stated working definition makes clear, the archaeology of mind is not concerned with what people were thinking in the past but, instead, with how they were doing their thinking. [Source: Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences; Cognitive Archaeology]

Belongs to group

URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/N9J-KTJG3RTL-F

Download this concept: