Archaeology : Problems with Cognitive Archaeology
Cognitive archaeology is a form of archaeology which attempts to study past ways of thought as inferred from cultural remains. It is a reaction to processual archaeology. Processual archaeology was modelled on the natural sciences and studied the artifacts rather than the ideologies behind them. What are the differences between cognitive and pocessual archaeology?
Processual |
Cognitive |
| Emphasis on context and etic (common to all cultures) | Emphasis on particulars |
| Seeks universal laws | Dismisses universal laws |
| Science | Rejects explicitly scientific methods and the theory and data division used by scientists |
| Aims at objectivity | Rejects objectivity |
| Culture as extrasomatic (beyond the individual) means of adaptation | Culture is illogical, perhaps material culture is not part of culture |
| Systemic (not normatve) perspective | Rejects systemic perspective |
| Cultural progess in evolution | Reject cultural progress in evolution |
Cognitive archaeology is a response to genuine problems in processualist archaeology. For instance history is too chaotic for there to be universal laws and there is certainly no progress in the evolution of cultures. But cognitive archaeology is postmodernism not science. As a reaction against science it is in fact an anti-science. Sometimes discussion goes as far as to deny that artifacts are part of culture, linked to the desire to seperate humans from the rest of the animals which make and use tools. Rather than study such physical traces and ake testable hypotheses about utilitarian objects, they prefer to psychoanalyse cultures and impose ideologies onto non-utilitarian artifacts. Processual archaeologists concentrated on tools and such things because it is imossible to consider speculation about past worldviews in terms of falsifiability. Cognitive archaeology is not valid way to consider archaeology despite it's valid criticisms and it's aim to relate to history, which is reconcilable with archaeology if history is considered science in the way hat Jared Diamond suggests it should be instead of as one of the humanities. Despite valid critiques of archaeology it hasn't provided certainties about past cultures and hasn't even tried to attempt scientific investigation.