Excavating the Mind

Book excerpt: Excavating the Mind deals with the relationship between the material culture of humans, i.e. our technologies, arts and environments, and our mental worlds. Emphasizing the close interdependence of mind and matter, the volume resonates with current developments within sociology, psychology and the cognitive sciences, yet it aims to supplement the focus on modern, predominantly Western societies and individuals with studies of different cultural contexts and processes in the evolutionary and historical past as well as the ethnographic present. With contributions from cognitive and social archaeology as well as anthropology, semiotics and the history of religion, the book combines well-illustrated case studies covering a wide chronological and geographic span - from Neolithic Europe to the present-day South Pacific - with incisive discussion of particular theoretical issues in the study of mind and material culture. Excavating the Mind is an original contribution to the multidisciplinary debate on the uniquely human entanglement of complex material cultures and mental worlds.