Towards a cognitive archaeology
Cognitive archaeology - the study of past ways of thought as inferred from material remains - still presents so many challenges to the practitioner that it seems if not a novel, at any rate, an uncertain endeavour. That this should be so is perhaps rather odd, for generations of archaeologists have written with considerable freedom about the thoughts and beliefs of ancient peoples, about the religions of early civilizations and about the art of prehistoric communities. With the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s, however, came an acute awareness that much earlier work was in some respects not well founded, or at least that the frameworks of inference by which statements were made about past symbolic systems were rarely made explicit and were frequently defective.