Giorgio Buccellati, Critique of Archaeological Reason
Excerpts, Summaries and Synopses

Colin Renfrew

by Giacomo Fornasieri


Extended summary of 1994 "Cognitive Archaeology"

Definition


Back to top		      The aim of cognitive archeology is to understand what and in what manner prehistoric people thought. This formal object needed to be observed with a specific method: the philosophical position, which many cognitive archeologists often support, can be described as a realist one. It can thus be defined as "the study of past ways of thought as inferred from material remains."
Previous research


Back to top		           Cognitive archeology is a subject still in its infancy, even though generations of archeologists have previously written about beliefs and thoughts of ancient people.
     Despite diffusion of this epistemic, even though approximate, approach, the optimism of New Archeology (also known as Processual archeology) and the new-discovered discipline potentialities, led to a deeper adherence to archeological data. Processual archeology aims that archeology is co-extended with anthropology, and its statements are founded on the persuasion that goals of archeology correspond with goals of anthropology. Arguing from a standpoint, characterized by the L. White definition of culture as "man's extra-somatic means of adaptation", was highlighted a functionalist point of view (functional-processual archeology). Therefore attention was often placed on social, economic aspects, ignoring beliefs and local identity.
     Nowadays workers of processual tradition are seeking to develop, focusing upon symbolic and cognitive characters, frameworks of inference to emendate the premature conclusions of New Archeology's early insights. For this reason, Renfrew might claim that processual archeology, far from vanishing, has just entered a new phase, called "cognitive-processual" archeology. There is, in fact, an unbroken tradition of thought that connects processual and cognitive archeology.
     The criticism that arises from the self-denominated "post-processualist" archeologists, unveil just an "anti-processualist" archeological position too. As a matter of fact, they advocate idealist and relativist interpretative categories. Their interpretation theory would probably be just a re-run of a past debate between two different Weltanschauung, "scene(s) of thought". Anti-processualists, probably situated themselves alongside those philosophers interested in understanding the "meaning" (Erlebins) hidden in the mind of an identifiable historical character, with a not well specified and intuitive "I-was-there" personal experience.
     On the other side, are situated those philosophers, who, with Marx e Darwin, think that all behaviours of human beings and human societies can be described and understood just with principles of science, avoiding the division between history and nature, supported by the idealists. One the purposes of the present work, is to bridge the gap between these aspects, through the archeological scientific field. Anti-processualists polemic, in fact, far from being inappropriate or unimportant about its issues, is rather unhelpful: they throw out "the realist baby with the positive bathwater".
The approach of "cognitive-processual" archaeology


Back to top		      Cognitive archeology is interested in developing a cognitive-processual approach, that uses the already existing methods of archeology to study the early use of symbols. Therefore its task is developing frameworks of inference to understand how ancient people used their minds. This attempt must be valued not "by apriori epistemological arguments, but by what can be discovered, constructed, re-constructed or otherwise informatively asserted about the past".
     In fact "The task for the cognitive archeologist is to devise methods of study and frameworks of inference which will, in practice, allow the archeological evidence to be used to make contributions to the discussion which go beyond more general speculation".
     The approach followed here seeks to study the way in which cognitive processes operated in specific ambits and analyze the interrelationship between these processes and contexts, where they arose and were promoted. More specifically, it concerns the human ability to construct and use symbols, developing Cassirer's intuition of man as an animal symbolicum. For processual-archeologist is enough to gain datas about how the minds of ancient communities and individuals worked and the manner in which it guided and shaped their actions. It is possible to consider symbols as describing aspects of human behavior like structured and purposive actions, planned work, measurement, social relations, the communication with supernatural, representation as production of depiction.



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     Cognitive archeology goes beyond processual-functional one, trying to apply methods of scientific enquiry to the cognitive sphere. This approach would be more concrete to suppose every person has a cognitive map of the reality, built upon the foundations of one's own experience. The existence of this mappa is indeed inferred from the common and shared human experience, in which "I", "you" and the "world" emerge as distinct, even not separated, entities. The circularity of thought, as a petitio principi, between an individual action's and his/her cognitive map, can be avoided in the data's concrete aspects, as the form of depictions of a subject of the world. The evidence and the existence of this map is needed from the object observed itself: without this interpretative scheme, it would be without meaning, not collocated in the same context where we have found it. Otherwise, the object would never exist, or better, would never be itself, have an "identity" without the cognitive map where it emerged from.
Therefore, these conclusions are perfectly agree with the recent discovering of philosophy of science, where it cannot be asserted anymore, that facts have an objective existence independent of theory: theory is necessary in the determination of facts, because knowledge is ever knowledge of a material object. But it can be investigated from a determinate standpoint: to knowledge is needed a formal object, which by formal questions select the aspect of the world going to be studied. On the other hand, theory needs facts, because needs elements of validation, as in a hypothetic-deductive system.
     The defining characteristic of cognitive archeology should be the more careful selection of roles for interpretation and inference framework construction and make explicit the assumptions which sustain the argument. As a matter of fact, validation does not rest on authority but on testability and on the explicitness of argumentation.