Renfrew Colin, Scarre Chris (eds.) Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1998. — 202 p.The fifteen papers in this volume explore how human beliefs have been externalised and "stored" in material form, thus making very intangible ideas exist in a permanent, tangible form. The volume benefits from a culturally and temporally comparative approach.Mind and matter: cognitive archaeology and external symbolic storage (Colin Renfrew)
Hominid enculturation and cognitive evolution (Merlin Donald)
Palaeolithic origins of artificial memory systems: an evolutionary perspective (Francesco d'Errico)
Material artefacts, symbolism, sociologists and archaeologists (David Halle)
Mimesis, imagination and role-play (David Harris)
Rock art: handmaiden to studies of cognitive evolution (Thomas Dowson)
Digging for memes: the role of material objects in cultural evolution (Mark Lake)
Personal experience and belief: the significance of external symbolic storage for the emergence of modern human cognition (E J Lowe)
The supernatural beings of prehistory and the external storage of religious ideas (Steven Mithen)
Chinese burial patterns: sources of information on thought and belief (Jessica Rawson)
Social relations and the idea of externality (Marilyn Strathern)
Some problems with the notion of external symbolic storage and the case of Neolithic material culture in Britain (Julian Thomas)
Symbolic behaviour: the origin of a spatial perspective (Ezra Zubrow and Patrick Daly)
Mind and artefact: a dialectical perpsective (Robert Hinde)
Material culture and cognition: concluding thoughts (Merlin Donald).Colin Renfrew (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, b. 1937) was formerly Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in the University of Cambridge, and Master of Jesus College Cambridge from 1986 to 1997.
Christopher Scarre is an archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the archaeology of Atlantic façade. He has participated in fieldwork projects in Britain, France, Greece, and India, and has directed excavations at Neolithic sites in France, Portugal and the Channel Islands.