Concepts and how they get that way

Drawing on the material culture of the Ancient Near East as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, the journey of how material number becomes a conceptual number is traced to address questions of how a particular material form might generate a concept and how concepts might ultimately encompass multiple material forms so that they include but are irreducible to all of them together. Material forms incorporated into the cognitive system affect the content and structure of concepts through their agency and affordances, the capabilities and constraints they provide as the material component of the extended, enactive mind. Material forms give concepts the tangibility that enables them to be literally grasped and manipulated. As they are distributed over multiple material forms, concepts effectively become independent of any of them, yielding the abstract irreducibility that makes a concept like number what it is. Finally, social aspects of material use—collaboration, ordinariness, and time—have important effects on the generation and distribution of concepts.

Updating the Abstract-Concrete Distinction in Ancient Near Eastern Numbers

The characterization of early token-based accounting using a concrete concept of number, later numerical notations an abstract one, has become well entrenched in the literature. After reviewing its history and assumptions, this article challenges the abstract-concrete distinction, presenting an alternative view of change in Ancient Near Eastern number concepts, wherein numbers are abstract from their inception and materially bound when most elaborated. The alternative draws on the chronological sequence of material counting technologies used in the Ancient Near East—fingers, tallies, tokens, and numerical notations—as reconstructed through archaeological and textual evidence and as interpreted through Material Engagement Theory, an extended-mind framework in which materiality plays an active role (Malafouris 2013).

Beyond Writing: The Development of Literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components.

Mark Making and Human Becoming

This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

Semióticas cognitivas y posthumanismo

Este artículo explora los avances en semiótica y ciencias cognitivas. En particular, se centra en los enfoques recientes denominados “cognición extendida” y “Teorías de acoplamiento material” –“Material Engagement Theory”– para situarlos en relación al poshumanismo. El objetivo final es abordar la cuestión fundamental de la agencia material no humana en el Antropoceno desde una perspectiva semiótica.

Primate tool use and the socio-ecology of thinging: how non-humans think through tools

While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds means that their application has been conservative, often retaining the methodological individualism of the cognitivist approach. As a result, primate models for technical and cognitive evolution, rooted in the teleological functionalism of the Neo-Darwinist approach, reduce tool use to the unit of the individual, conflating technology with technique and physical cognition with problem-solving computations of energetic efficiency. This article attempts, through the application of material engagement theory, to explore non-human primate technology as a non-individualistic phenomenon in which technique is co-constructed through the ontogenetic development of skill within a dynamic system of structured action affordances and material interactions which constitute an emergent, species-specific mode of technical cognition.

Project Holocene: The Clayful Phenomenology of Jōmon Flame Pots

As a ceramic artist, I was surprised to find that archaeological research gives little attention to the extraordinary sensorial qualities of Jōmon flame pots. To understand why, I consider the challenges of including sensory experience in archaeological method and the problems of leaving it out. Turning to the typological approach to Jōmon pottery, I highlight the assumptions it makes about cognition before introducing Material Engagement Theory (MET) as an alternative. A MET-oriented reanalysis of the typological evidence places sensation at the centre of enquiry and removes the need to interpret symbolic, representational content. Through MET, I consider the sensorial qualities of flame pots, not as prehistory but as they appeared recently and unexpectantly during the process of modelling clay into sculptures for a contemporary art project. Flame pots joined conceptually with the explorative activity of clay. A prehistoric/contemporary artefact/modelling system was created and developed itself into a method of monitoring intra-systemic experience—clayful phenomenology. The findings cover five themes: enacted agency, iconicity from indexicality, bending rules/undermining habits, the choreography of material engagement and the phenomenology of space.

The rupture as a drawing-in of experience

The rupture as a drawing-in of experience constructs perspectives on architectural education, as an act of architectural discourse proper in order that architectural education might facilitate the learning of how to draw-in experience as a process. This paper unpacks material engagement theory from the vantage of drawing and elicits three levels of engagement; of action, object and meaning together with a fourth proposed here, that of experience. It goes on to follow a student-led project using rupturing as a methodological approach to understand the role of drawing and the four aspects that influence practitioners: the act of drawing as a means to illuminate fields of learning as distinct paradigms of design strategies; the process of drawing as a strategy of architectural work; the construction of a drawing process and Learners Journey as a sequentially mapped out procedure of work; and the experiencing of drawing in broadening the context to develop a new terroire or theory of drawing. These four aspects of drawing evidence an emergent theory and methodological approach in using drawing to engage with cultural and architectural conversations, materially. Through the process of rupture, this text positions drawing at the heart of a reframing of the interactions with things and experiences of material agency and material imagination through the act of drawing. Rupturing as a method therefore offers the potential for significant and insightful opportunities in understanding the role of drawing and its ability to further MET theory's main aims. The paper also puts forward the notion that the role of drawing more broadly may sit along materiality, material turns and its techniques to interact into and through a wider anthropological study of drawing as a comparative study in the materiality of art; the way drawing affects our learning, our thinking and our understanding of culture and matter.

Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology With Things

We live and we think inside a world of things made and found. Still, psychological science has shown little interest in understanding the exact nature of the relation between cognition and material culture. As a result, the diachronic influence and transformative potential of things in human mental life remains little understood. Most psychologists would see things as external and passive: the lifeless objects of human consciousness, perception, and memory. On the contrary, my main argument in this article is that things matter to human psychology and should be taken seriously. Although things usually pass unnoticed, they are anything but trivial. Things have a special place in human cognitive life and evolution. We think “with” and “through” things, not simply “about” things. In that sense, things occupy the middle space in between what are usually referred to as mind and matter. Material-engagement theory provides a way to describe and study that middle space where brain, body, and culture are conflated.