1. The Twain Shall Meet: Themes at the Intersection of Archaeology and Philosophy
Anton Killin & Sean Allen-Hermanson
Part I. Theory and Inference
2. “I’m Not Saying It Was Aliens”: An Archaeological and Philosophical Analysis of a Conspiracy Theory
Derek D. Turner & Michelle I. Turner
3. Mortar and Pestle or Cooking Vessel? When Archaeology Makes Progress Through Failed Analogies
Rune Nyrup
4. Scaffolding and Concept-Metaphors: Building Archaeological Knowledge in Practice
Bruce Routledge
5. Human Curiosity Then and Now: The Anthropology, Archaeology, and Psychology of Patent Protections
Armin W. Schulz
6. Music Archaeology, Signaling Theory, Social Differentiation
Anton Killin
7. The Archaeology and Philosophy of Health: Navigating the New Normal Problem
Carl Brusse
Part II. Language and Cognition
8. Embodied and Extended Numerical Cognition
Marilynn Johnson & Caleb Everett
9. Late Pleistocene Dual Process Minds
Murray Clarke
10. Theory of Mind, System-2 Thinking, and the Origins of Language
Ronald J. Planer
Part III. Normativity and Normative Issues
11. The Acheulean Origins of Normativity
Ceri Shipton, Mark Nielsen & Fabio Di Vincenzo
12. Social Archaeology as the Study of Ethical Life: Agency, Intentionality, and Responsibility
Artur Ribeiro
13. Are Archaeological Parks the New Amusement Parks? UNESCO World Heritage Status and Tourism
Elizabeth Scarbrough
Anton Killin is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Philosophy and Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language at the Australian National University, and the Department of Philosophy at Mount Allison University in Sackville NB, Canada. Anton’s primary areas of research include philosophy of the sciences, philosophy of the arts (especially music), and evolutionary theory. Anton has published on the evolution of music and language, and with Adrian Currie, cognitive archaeology.
Sean Allen-Hermanson is Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University in Miami FL, USA. Sean’s primary areas of research include philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Sean has published on extended cognition, cultural evolution, comparative psychology, and implicit bias.
The editors are also the guest editors of a special issue of Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy entitled “Archaeology and Philosophy”.
This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields.
Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.