Prehistory: The Making of the Human Mind (Modern Library Chronicles) by Colin Renfrew

Author:Colin Renfrew [Renfrew, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588368089
Publisher: Modern Library

X represents Y in context C.

In linguistics, X is sometimes referred to as the signifier, and Y is the thing signified. This simple definition is a convenient one, and, as noted earlier, it holds for symbols of all kinds. The stripes represent the rank on the dress of the soldier; the word represents the animal in the speech (and in the mind) of the Englishman or Frenchman; the headgear represents the royalty of the person depicted.

But there is a fresh and important underlying point here concerning the way new symbolic relationships come to be formulated. When new practices or understandings come into existence, it is sometimes an entire relationship that is new, an entirely new concept, not just a new symbolic representation of the reality by the symbolic form. There is often a new and underlying material reality that is grasped or understood for the first time when a new symbolic relationship is developed. Such a new material reality has to be rooted in a physical understanding of the world and in our experience of, or material engagement with, the world. This is important. It implies that the concept is not simply an abstract or mentalist rendition of a preexisting reality. Rather, it requires and involves the discovery or realization of a new kind of physical reality. To be clear, this point needs to be illustrated by means of an example.

Let us consider the measurement of weight. We noted earlier that the study of measure is one of the developing fields of cognitive archaeology. When a series of well-shaped objects made of a dense material and of ascending size, discovered among the artifacts from some prehistoric culture, are today weighed and found to be multiples of what we would call a unit of weight, it is often reasonable to infer that the culture in question had formulated its own system for units of mass. The stone cubes used as weights in the Indus Valley civilization are a good example. But if we go on to ask what these new artifacts were symbols of, it turns out that they were used to symbolize and quantify an inherent property not previously identified or quantified, which then became isolated for study and measured for the first time. We are today all familiar with the notion of weight, both as a measure and as utilizing the simple idea that something may have weight and be heavy. But it is worth considering how the notion of measurable weight could come about in the first place.

In reality, “weight” must first have been apprehended through physical experience—you could not make it up if you had not experienced it. Weight could be experienced and apprehended in the first place only by the physical action of holding a heavy object in the hand and perceiving that it was heavy: heavier than other similar objects. If you have such a symbolic relationship, the stone weight has to relate to some property that exists out there in the real world. In

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