Chapter 12 Flashcards
What is the central challenge of “cognitive archaeology”?
Cognitive (γνωστική) archaeology aims to study the perception, description and classification of the universe; the nature of supernatural; the principles, philosophies, and values by which human societies are governed; and the ways in which aspects of the world, the supernatural, or human values are conveyed in art.
Studying these ancient modes of thought requires the interpretation of symbols, objects or acts (verbal and nonverbal) that by cultural convention stand for something else with which they have no necessary connection. This means that without the same ethnographic context, there is no obvious way to connect a symbol to its meaning.
How do archaeologists study ancient religion?
Archaeologists attempt to understand past religions - specific sets of beliefs based on people’s ultimate relation to the supernatural. Such religious beliefs are manifested in everyday life through rituals - behaviors such as prayer, music, feasting, sacrifice, and taboos. As such, ritual is a material manifestation of the abstract idea of religion and archaeology’s easiest portal to the study of ancient religions.
Archaeologists also attempt to understand cosmology. This encompasses how past cultures explain their universe - how it originated and developed, how the various parts fit together, and what laws it obeys - and expresses their concern with what the future of the universe holds.
Where archaeologists have available some ethnographic date that are closely related to the archaeological case, they may be able to extrapolate backward from the present to the past. Even these cases, however, harbor the chance that a symbol meant something different in the past than it does in the present.
Iconography, a culture’s expression of abstract ideas in art and writing systems, can also be used to reconstruct the religious and other ideas that stand behind the art.
Can archaeologists learn anything from very ancient cases that have no close cultural descendants?
The study of ancient symbols runs the risk of becoming a free-for-all, with any interpretation being as valid as another. It is perhaps especially important, then, that the study of ancient iconography and other manifestations of a culture’s cosmology and religion adhere to the canons of scientific analysis.
In instances where ethnographic data are not available, archaeologists must be more restrained in their interpretations, not focusing on the specific meaning of particular symbols but looking to the more general character of thought itself.
