ABSTRACT
The term ‘cognitive archaeology’ is taken from Medin and Wattenmaker (1987), who define it as the search for biological-cognitive constraints that may become embodied in organisms as a result of their interaction with the environment during evolution. This chapter discusses how such constraints influence language evolution. If language indeed emerged in humans as a cognitive adaptation (e.g. Jerison 1988), then cognitive archaeology can have explanatory value in a theory of language evolution because these constraints must be reflected in language.
