Technological transformations imply cultural transformations and complex cognition

Abstract

As archaeologists, we cannot access culture or cognition directly; we can only interpret levels of cultural or cognitive complexity from circumstantial evidence or from technological evidence. Some technologies cannot be achieved without complex cognition. Interpreting technological, cognitive and cultural complexity requires carefully constructed bridging theory between archaeologically-recovered data and interpretations about behavior and human capacity. Some of the technologies that imply complex cognition also involve permanent transformations of their ingredients. Such technologies imply that the artisans were capable of conceptualizing cultural transformations. Iron Age material culture items clearly demonstrate the link between technological and cultural transformations. Metal furnaces are symbolically linked to human fertility and motifs on a number of artifacts are reminiscent of human rites of passage. I suggest here that material culture and motifs in the deeper past may similarly connect to cultural transformations, even though it is unlikely that the meaning of these can be decoded.