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Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record

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Abstract

Living humans are unique among the animal kingdom with respect to their ability to externalize mental representations outside the brain through a variety of media and in a recursive or creative manner (i.e., generating a potentially infinite array of combinations). Earlier humans evolved two specialized organs—the hand and the vocal tract—as primary instruments for externalizing artificial or semantic representations. These organs and the externalized representations may have co-evolved with the Homo brain. The archaeological record yields examples of simple representations by 1.6 mya. More complex, hierarchical, and recursive forms are evident by roughly 0.25 mya. Complex and highly recursive representations in a wide range of media (including representations of representations in the form of visual art) emerge after 0.1 mya among anatomically modern humans.

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to M. V. Anikovich and S. A. Vasil’ev for their invitation to give an earlier version of this paper at the Institute of the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg on 24 May 2006. I thank Valerie E. Stone and Bob Levin for stimulating discussions that contributed to this paper, and Colin Renfrew, Valerie E. Stone, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Figure 6 was prepared by Ian Torao Hoffecker.

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  1. Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    John F. Hoffecker

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Hoffecker, J.F. Representation and Recursion in the Archaeological Record. J Archaeol Method Theory 14, 359–387 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-007-9041-5

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