An Introduction to Evolutionary Cognitive Archaeology by Thomas Wynn & Frederick L. Coolidge

Author:Thomas Wynn & Frederick L. Coolidge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Blombos Engravings

Artifacts from the South African Middle Stone Age site of Blombos Cave have been touchstones in an archaeological debate about the emergence of modern behavior, art, and symbolism. Beginning in the 1990s, Christopher Henshilwood and colleagues excavated several provocative categories of artifacts that extended the time depth of aesthetic productions back to 77,000 years before present. Two categories of evidence have been the center of a spirited debate—shell beads and engraved pieces of ochre. The beads are shells of Nassarius sp. that are bright blue when fresh. People living at Blombos collected them from a nearby estuary, carefully punched a hole in each, and strung them on a cord of some sort. We know this because of a careful microscopic study wear patterns done by archaeologist Francesco d’Errico (d’Errico et al., 2003, 2008). The engravings are perhaps more provocative from an aesthetic perspective. They are cross-hatched designs engraved into the surfaces of pieces of ochre, a mineral pigment.

Figure 12 Blombos engraving on ground surface of a “pencil” of ochre, ca. 8 cm (Hodgson, 2014).

The regularity and arrangement of the lines effectively eliminates any possibility that these were natural or random effects. Someone produced the design deliberately. Almost all participants in the debate agree on these descriptive facts. Interpretation has not been so agreeable. Henshilwood himself, working with d’Errico and others, argued that the beads and engravings were evidence of modern symbolic culture, including language and art (d’Errico et al., 2003, 2008; Henshilwood & Dubreuil, 2011). Many, indeed most, Palaeolithic specialists agreed and celebrated this breakthrough in understanding the origin of modern symbolism and art. But not everyone was convinced. As discussed earlier, linguist Rudolf Botha detected a serious logical flaw in the logic concerning language. But what about the suggestion that the engravings were solid evidence of art? This claim has been most effectively challenged by Derek Hodgson.

Hodgson (2014, 2017) argued that the cross-hatched engravings could be understood more parsimoniously as patterns that elicited pleasure via the visual processing system itself. He labels his hypothesis the Neurovisual Resonance hypothesis and has applied it not just to 77,000-year-old engravings, but to a selection of artifacts going back 1.7 million years to the advent of handaxes. Put simply, making geometric patterns is pleasurable in its own right. The patterns need not have had any symbolic message, or even shared meaning or value. Hodgson was able to account for the engravings, and much more, by invoking the sensorimotor component of aesthetic experience alone. Henshilwood and d’Errico made the unwarranted assumption that the symbolic meaning component of modern aesthetic cognition must also have been in play because in modern aesthetics it is indeed a package. But, as we have seen, and Hodgson masterfully documents, this needn’t have been true in deep past. That Hodgson’s hypothesis has also been a productive approach to much earlier hominin aesthetics makes it that much more powerful.

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