The role of material culture in human time representation: Calendrical systems as extensions of mental time travel

Adaptive Behavior

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 63-76

  de Smedt, Johan ^a   de Cruz, Helen ^b  

^a GHENT UNIVERSITY   (Belgium)

^b UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

Author keywords

calendars; cognitive archeology; episodic thinking; epistemic artifacts; Mental time travel

Indexed keywords

EID: 79952130208     PISSN: 10597123     EISSN: 17412633     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1059712310396382     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Addis, D., Wong, A., & Schacter, D. (2007). Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1363-1377.
2. Atance, C., & O'Neill, D. (2001). Episodic future thinking. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 533-539.
3. Bassi, M. (1988). On the Borana calendrical system: A preliminary field report. Current Anthropology, 29, 619-624.
4. Bateson, M. (2003). Interval timing and optimal foraging. In W. Meck (Ed.), Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Interval Timing (pp. 113-141). Broca Raton: CRC Press.
5. Baxter, M. (2001). Methodological issues in the study of assemblage diversity. American Antiquity, 66, 715-725.
6. Berger, T., & Trinkaus, E. (1995). Patterns of trauma among the Neandertals. Journal of Archaeological Science, 22, 841-852.
7. Breuer, T., Ndoundou-Hockembal, M., & Fishlock, V. (2005). First observation of tool use in wild gorillas. PLoS Biology, 3, e380.S.
8. Cachel, S. (1997). Dietary shifts and the European Upper Palaeolithic transition. Current Anthropology, 38, 579-603.
9. Caspari, R., & Lee, S.-H. (2004). Older age becomes common late in human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 101, 10895-10900.
10. Ceci, L. (1978). Watchers of the Pleiades: Ethnoastronomy among native cultivators in northeastern North America. Ethnohistory, 25, 301-317.
11. Chandrasekharan, S., & Stewart, T.C. (2007). The origin of epistemic structures and proto-representations. Adaptive Behavior, 15, 329-353.
12. Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58, 7-19.
13. Clarke, P.A. (2009). Australian aboriginal ethnometeorology and seasonal calendars. History and Anthropology, 20, 79-106.
14. Clayton, N., & Dickinson, A. (1998). Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays. Nature, 395, 272-274.
15. Clottes, J., Courtin, J., Valladas, H., Cachier, H., Mercier, N., & Arnold, M. (1992). La grotte Cosquer datée. Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique française, 89, 230-234.
16. Delluc, B., & Delluc, C.R. (2006). Art paléolithique, saisons et climats. Comptes Rendus Palevol, 5, 203-211.
17. d'Errico, F. (1994). Birds of Cosquer cave. The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) and its significance during the Upper Palaeolithic. Rock Art Research, 11, 45-57.
18. d'Errico, F. (1998). Palaeolithic origins of artificial memory systems: An evolutionary perspective. In C. Renfrew & C. Scarre (Eds.), Cognition and material culture: The Archaeology of symbolic storage (pp. 19-50). Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
19. Di Paolo, E.A. (1997). An investigation into the evolution of communication. Adaptive Behavior, 6, 285-324.
20. Ghezzi, I., & Ruggles, C. (2007). Chankillo: A 2300-year-old solar observatory in coastal Peru. Science, 315, 1239-1243.
21. Gilbert, D.T., Gill, M.J., & Wilson, T.D. (2002). The future is now: Temporal correction in affective forecasting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 88, 430-444.
22. Hassabis, D., Kumaran, D., Vann, S., & Maguire, E. (2007). Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 104, 1726-1731.
23. Henrich, J. (2004). Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses-The Tasmanian case. American Antiquity, 69, 197-214.
24. Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
25. Jègues-Wolkiewiez, C. (2005). Aux racines de l'astronomie, ou l'ordre caché d'une Å"uvre paléolithique. Antiquités Nationales, 37, 43-62.
26. Kirsh, D. (1996). Adapting the environment instead of oneself. Adaptive Behavior, 4, 415-452.
27. Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P. (1994). On distinguishing epistemic from pragmatic action. Cognitive Science, 18, 513-549.
28. Klein, R. (2001). Southern Africa and modern human origins. Journal of Anthropological Research, 57, 1-16.
29. Klein, R., Cruz-Uribe, K., & Skinner, J. (1999). Fur seal bones reveal variability in prehistoric human seasonal movements on the southwest African coast. Archaeozoologia, 10, 181-188.
30. Kummer, H. (1995). Causal knowledge in animals. In D. Sperber, D. Premack & A. Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition. A Multidisciplinary Debate (pp. 26-36). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
31. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
32. Loftus, E. (2003). Make-believe memories. American Psychologist, 58, 867-873.
33. Mandryk, C.A.S. (1993). Hunter-gatherer social costs and the nonviability of submarginal environments. Journal of Anthropological Research, 49, 39-71.
34. Marsh, E., & Tversky, B. (2004). Spinning the stories of our lives. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 491-503.
35. Marshack, A. (1972). Cognitive aspects of Upper Paleolithic engraving. Current Anthropology, 13, 445-461.
36. Marshack, A. (1991). The Taï plaque and calendrical notation in the Upper Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1, 25-61.
37. McDonald, J. (1994). Identifying great auks and other birds in Palaeolithic art of western Europe. Antiquity, 68, 850-858.
38. Mithen, S. (1988). Looking and learning: Upper Palaeolithic art and information gathering. World Archaeology, 19, 297-327.
39. Mithen, S. (2000). Mind, brain and material culture: An archaeological perspective. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind. Modularity, language and meta-cognition (pp. 207-217). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
40. Mondragón, C. (2004). Of winds, worms and mana: The traditional calendar of the Torres Islands, Vanuatu. Oceania, 74, 289-308.
41. Morewedge, C.K., Gilbert, D.T., & Wilson, T.D. (2005). The least likely of times: How remembering the past biases forecasts of the future. Psychological Science, 16, 626-630.
42. Niven, L. (2007). From carcass to cave: Large mammal exploitation during the Aurignacian at Vogelherd, Germany. Journal of Human Evolution, 53, 362-382.
43. Nooter Roberts, M., & Roberts, A. (1996). Memory: Luba art and the making of history. New York: Museum for African Art.
44. Norris, R.P., & Hamacher, D.W. (2009). The astronomy of aboriginal Australia. In D. Valls-Gabaud & A. Boksenberg (Eds.), The rÃ́le of astronomy in society and culture (pp. 10-17). Paris: International Astronomical Union.
45. Perner, J., & Ruffman, T. (1995). Episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: Developmental evidence and a theory of childhood amnesia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 59, 516-546.
46. Powell, A., Shennan, S., & Thomas, M. (2009). Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior. Science, 324, 1298-1301.
47. Raby, C.R., Alexis, D.M., Dickinson, A., & Clayton, N. (2007). Planning for the future by western scrub-jays. Nature, 445, 919-921.
48. Radcliffe-Brown, A. (1922). The Andaman islanders. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
49. Rappenglück, M. (2001). Palaeolithic timekeepers looking at the golden gate of the ecliptic: The lunar cycle and the Pleiades in the cave of La-Tête-du-Lion (Ardèche, France) - 21,000 BP. Earth, Moon and Planets, 85/86, 391-404.
50. Rappenglück, M. (2004). A Palaeolithic planetarium underground-The cave of Lascaux. Migration & Diffusion, 5, 93-119.
51. Richards, M., Pettitt, P., Stiner, M., & Trinkaus E. (2001). Stable isotope evidence for increasing dietary breadth in the European mid Upper Paleolithic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 98, 6528-6532.
52. Roberts, R.G., Jones, R., & Smith, M.A. (1990). Thermoluminescence dating of a 50,000-year-old human occupation site in northern Australia. Nature, 345, 153-156.
53. Sansom, B. (2006). The brief reach of history and the limitation of recall in traditional aboriginal societies and cultures. Oceania, 76, 150-172.
54. Sharifian, F. (2003). On cultural conceptualizations. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3, 187-207.
55. Shine, R., & Brown, G.P. (2008). Adapting to the unpredictable: Reproductive biology of vertebrates in the Australian wet-dry tropics. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363, 363-373.
56. Soffer, O. (1989). The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition on the Russian plain. In P. Mellars & C. Stringer (Eds.), The human revolution. Behavioural and biological perspectives on the origins of modern humans (pp. 714-742). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
57. Steele, T. (2003). Using mortality profiles to infer behavior in the fossil record. Journal of Mammalogy, 84, 418-430.
58. Stevens, J.R., Rosati, A.G., Ross, K.R., & Hauser, M.D. (2005). Will travel for food: Spatial discounting in two New World monkeys. Current Biology, 15, 1855-1860.
59. Stewart, K. (1994). Early hominid utilisation of fish resources and implications for seasonality and behaviour. Journal of Human Evolution, 27, 229-245.
60. Suddendorf, T., Addis, D.R., & Corballis, M.C. (2009). Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 1317-1324.
61. Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M.C. (1997). Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind. Genetic, Social and General Psychology Monographs, 123, 133-167.
62. Thompson, C., Barresi, J., & Moore, C. (1997). The development of future-oriented prudence and altruism in preschoolers. Cognitive Development, 12, 199-212.
63. Thornton, R. (2003). A report of a new Mandan calendric chart. Ethnohistory, 50, 697-705.
64. Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1-25.
65. Tversky, B., & Marsh, E. (2000). Biased retellings of events yield biased memories. Cognitive Psychology, 40, 1-38.
66. Vanhaeren, M., & d'Errico, F. (2005). Grave goods from the Saint-Germain-la-Rivière burial: Evidence for social inequality in the Upper Palaeolithic. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 24, 117-134.