Handbook of Theories and Methods in Archaeology--论文代写范文精选

除了现有的传播模式,我们也感兴趣其使用的工具，这可能表明新的认知能力,信念结构,或合作的水平。一个考古时期突然出现的各种各样的新对象，可能与创新能力有关。通过确凿的考古发现与人类学数据(头盖骨的大小或形状)从认知科学与知识,我们可以猜测,发生了什么样的潜在认知变化。下面的paper代写范文将进行详述。

Introduction: What Can Archaeology Tell Us about the Mind?
What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative but nevertheless increasingly sophisticated efforts to unravel how modern human cognition came about. By considering objects within their archaeological context, we have begun to piece together something of the way of life of people who inhabited particular locales, which in turn reflects their underlying thought processes.
 
Comparing data between different sites or time periods tells us something about the horizontal (within generation) or vertical (between generations) transmission of material culture. In addition to patterns of transmission of existing kinds of artifacts, we are also interested in novel artifacts that might be indicative of new cognitive abilities, belief structures, or levels of cooperation. An archaeological period marked by the sudden appearance of many kinds of new objects may suggest the onset of enhanced creative abilities. By corroborating archaeological findings with anthropological data (evidence of sudden change in the size or shape of the cranium, for example) with knowledge from cognitive science about how minds function, we can make educated guesses as to what kinds of underlying cognitive changes could be involved, and how the unique abilities of Homo sapiens arose.
 
In this chapter, we consider three questions about human cognition that can be addressed through archaeological data: (1) How did human culture begin? (2) Where, when, and how did humans acquire the unique cognitive abilities of modern Homo sapiens? and (3) What role do artifacts play in the evolution of these cognitive abilities?

The Origin of Human Culture
The earliest known artifacts, referred to as Oldowan -- after Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, where they were first found -- were simple stone tools, pointed at one end (Leakey 1971), and widely associated with Homo habilis, although it is possible that they were also used by late australopithecenes (de Baune 2004). The oldest of these Oldowan tools, from Kada Gona and Kada Hadar, date to approximately 2.5 million years ago (Semaw et al. 1997). The earliest use of stone tools was probably to split fruits and nuts; "the moment when a hominin ...produced a cutting tool by using a thrusting percussion ...marks a break between our predecessors and the specifically human" (de Baune 2004:142). With sharp edges, Lower Palaeolithic tools could be used to sharpen wood implements and occasionally butcher small game. 

Using the sharp flakes associated with these tools, Homo habilis butchered animals for meat, as these tools are found in context with cut-marked bones at the FLK Zinj site (1.75 Ma) in the Olduvai Gorge (Leakey 1971; Bunn and Kroll 1986). Although it has been debated whether they were scavenging, hunting, or power scavenging by scaring carnivores away (e.g., Binford 1977; 1983, 1988; Bunn and Kroll 1986; Selvaggio 1998), it is clear that these hominids were capable of acquiring the richer, more meat-rich portions of a kill (Bunn and Kroll 1986). This may have introduced a positive feedback cycle, in that meat eating, by allowing a smaller gut, provided metabolic support for a larger brain (Aiello and Wheeler 1995) which, in turn, would improve cognitive ability for group hunting using mental landscape maps, interpretation of visual clues such as animal tracks, and knowledge of predator behavior.
 
With the arrival of Homo erectus by 1.8 Ma, we see sophisticated, task-specific stone hand axes, complex stable seasonal habitats, and long-distance hunting strategies involving large game. The size of the Homo erectus brain was approximately 1,000 cc, about 25% larger than that of Homo habilis, and 75% the cranial capacity of modern humans (Aiello 1996; Ruff et al. 1997; Lewin, 1999). By 1.6 Ma, Homo erectus had dispersed as far as Southeast Asia (Swisher et al. 1994), indicating the ability to migrate and adapt to vastly different climates (Cachel and Harris 1995; Walker and Leakey 1993; Anton and Swisher 2004). In Africa, West Asia, and Europe, Homo erectus carried the Aschulean handaxe, which was present by 1.4 Ma in Ethiopia (Asfaw et al. 1992). A do-it-all tool that may even have had some function as a social status symbol (Kohn and Mithen 1999) these symmetrical biface tools probably required three stages of production, bifacial knapping, and considerable skill and spatial ability to achieve their final form. The handaxe persisted as a tool of choice for over a million years, spreading by 500 ka into Europe, where was it used by H. heidelbergensis until the Mousterian at about 200 ka. This period also marks the first solid evidence for controlled use of fire, by 800 ka in the Levant (Goren-Inbar et al. 2004). A 400,000 year-old, fire-hardened wooden spear found at Schningen, Germany (Thieme 1997) shows beyond doubt that Middle Pleistocene Homo were sophisticated big-game hunters (Dennell 1997).

Conclusions
There are many ways in which human cognition differs from that of other species, such as our ability to generate and understand complex languages and other symbolic structures appearing in art, science, politics, and religion. The appearance of stone tools (2.5 Ma), strategic big game hunting (1.6 Ma), controlled fire use (0.8 Ma), and complex habitats suggests that prior to the onset of complex language and symbolism, hominid cognition already differed profoundly from that of other species. It has been suggested that this reflects onset of the capacity to imitate, or onset of a theory of mind enabling attribution of mental states to others. However, since these abilities are also present in other social species, a more likely suggestion is that it reflects onset of the capacity for self-triggering of thoughts or motor patterns such that one evokes the next. This underlies abilities ranging from refinement of skills for tool production to enactment of events. A plausible explanation for how it came about is that encephalization enabled mental representations of events and skills to become more broadly distributed and thus the resulting memory was more fine-grained, facilitating the retrieval or reminding events that recursively reiterated constitute a self-triggered thought process.
 
Many, but not all, archaeologists believe that these distinctly human abilities likely arose about fifty thousand years ago, or perhaps somewhat earlier, during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic. Although encephalization has been occurring throughout the last two million years, a second spurt occurred between 600,000 and 150,000 ka, well before the cultural transition of the Middle/Upper Paleolithic. Thus this second cultural transition cannot be attributed to something so simple as the sudden appearance of a language module; a feasible explanation must involve not new brain parts or increased memory but a more sophisticated way of using the available memory.

The advent of language or symbol use may be part of the answer, but begs the question what sort of cognitive functioning is capable of producing and using language or symbols. A more in-depth examination of spatiotemporal patterns in the archaeological record, however, reveals not just the pronounced appearance symbolic artifacts, but evidence that they build on one another in cumulative fashion; that is, exhibit the ratchet effect. Indeed some believe this to be the most distinctly human characteristic of all. 

It is indicative of conceptual fluidity, which involves combining ideas in new ways and adapting old ideas to new circumstances, and requires both the complex mental operations characteristic of analytic thought, and the intuitive, analogical processes characteristic of associative thought. Thus it has been proposed that culture was brought about by onset of the capacity to adapt others' ideas to ones' own circumstances, and this requires (1) an integrated internal model of the world, and (2) a sophisticated way of navigating that model of the world, such that relationships can be retrieved and creatively elaborated. This provides a possible cognitive explanation for the explosion of task-specific decorated tools, beads, pottery, and so forth during the Middle/Upper Paleolithic: they reflect onset of the capacity to spontaneously shift between these two forms of thought depending on the situation. Together, analytical thought allowing calculation within a domain, and associative thought forging connections amongst seemingly disparate domains. This paved the way for episodes encoded in memory to become integrated through the formation of a dynamical network of concepts to yield a self-modifying internal model of the world.
 
The last section of this chapter looked at the relationship between minds, artifacts, and evolution. Evolutionary archaeologists view artifacts as part of the human phenotype, which increase biological fitness through their functionality. However we saw that although there may be a genetic component to the capacity to produce a well-crafted artifact it is not the only or even dominant influence; culture appears to play a formidable role. We also saw that artifacts themselves do not constitute replicators, and are thus not the basic unit of a cultural evolution process. However it is possible that integrated worldviews evolve in the same primitive sense as the first living organisms, through an emergent, self-organized process, resulting in a structure that can be mathematically described as a closure structure. Because no self-assembly code is involved, the evolution of such emergent structures is Lamarckian; acquired characteristics are inherited.(论文代写)

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