ABSTRACT
Recently there has been an increased interest in the archaeological recovery of past ideas, reconstrucing the minds of humans long dead (Leone 1982; Renfrew 1982b). The notion that archaeologists study artifacts made by man which were ‘the product of the human mind and human craftsmanship’ (Daniel 1962, 30) and ‘projections of his mind and embodiments of his history’ (Clark 1975, 9; see also Childe 1949) is of course not new and is emphasised in Collingwood’s (1956) contribution to the idealist view of history. Yet in the ladder of inference outlined by Hawkes (1954) the ideational realm was seen as being the most difficult to grasp and for many ‘New Archaeologists’, at least initially, attempts at getting into prehistoric people’s heads were decried as palaeopsychology (Binford 1965, 203-10) and for Binford (1982, 162) archaeological reconstruction of mental phenomena is still deemed inappropriate. As Leone (1982) has cogently argued, the renewed attempts at reconstructing mind take varied paths from the symbolic functionalism of, for example, Wobst (1977), Fritz (1978), Hall (1977), Flannery and Marcus (1976) and Friedel (1981), to the structuralism of Leroi-Gourhan (1967), Deetz (1977) and Glassie (1975), the cognitive accounts of Kehoe and Kehoe (1973) or Muller (1977), the various materialist studies of ideology (Rowlands 1980; Tilley 1981; Shennan 1982) or of archaeological interpretations as ideology (Leone 1978; Meltzer 1981). Often, however, these studies appear to side-step important epistemological issues raised by the ‘archaeology of mind’. In particular, how can a scientific archaeology devoted to the testing of theories against data cope with verifying statements about ideas in prehistoric people’s heads?
