Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology

Psychology in Prehistory

Tracy B. Henley, Matt J. Rossano, Edward P. Kardas, Tracy B. Henley, Matt J. Rossano, Edward P. Kardas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429950025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The remains that archaeologists uncover reveal ancient minds at work as much as ancient hands, and for decades many have sought a better way of understanding those minds. This understanding is at the forefront of cognitive archaeology, a discipline that believes that a greater application of psychological theory to archaeology will further our understanding of the evolution of the human mind.

Bringing together a diverse range of experts including archaeologists, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, historians, and philosophers, in one comprehensive volume, this accessible and illuminating book is an important resource for students and researchers exploring how the application of cognitive archaeology can significantly and meaningfully deepen their knowledge of early and ancient humans. This seminal volume opens the field of cognitive archaeology to scholars across the behavioral sciences.

Part I
Prehistory from the perspective of physiological and developmental psychology

1
Introduction

What would Wundt think?

Edward P. Kardas and Tracy B. Henley

[T]he psychological historian is a prophet with his eyes turned towards the past. He ought not only to be able to tell what has happened, but also what necessarily must have happened, according to the position of events.

(Wundt, 1912/1973, p. 167)

Jacques Cauvin (2002, p. 236) defined cognitive archaeology simply as “reconstructing prehistoric ‘cognition,’” and as such, connected it with the domain of psychology. Psychology, in turn, is defined as the study of mind and behavior, and since the late 1800s that has primarily manifested as the empirical consideration of live subjects used in experiments, correlational studies, interviews, and observations. Most contemporary psychological work traces its roots to Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory-based model, what is sometimes termed as his fi rst psychology (e.g., Henley, 2018a; Kardas, 2014). Based largely upon this methodology, psychology has generally not been connected with the questions of prehistory. One can find isolated considerations, such as Rollo May’s (1991) work on myth, but a clear, temporal division of labor with respect to the study of human nature seems to suit modern psychology. That is, the study of social behavior among college sophomores is absolutely a psychological topic, but considerations of the daily life of Incan priests, Ming dynasty philosophers, Sumerian scribes, or Neolithic hunter-gatherers is the province of historians and anthropologists.

Evolutionary psychology stands as something of an anomaly to this picture. It potentially offers a grand theory for psychology grounded in our evolutionary history as a way of explaining the behaviors of college sophomores as well as Sumerian scribes. But, even if we stipulate that evolutionary psychology is “on the rise” (due in no small part to popular works by Pinker [1997] and others), many psychologists see it as not immediately relevant. That is, the majority of empirical work done in clinical, cognitive, developmental, educational, physiological, or social psychology, just to name a few subfields, is not done from an evolutionary perspective and usually makes no attempt to align itself toward that grand theory. Instead, psychologists remain interested in matters such as treating schizophrenics, understanding the structure of memory and cognition, measuring intelligence, teaching middle-schoolers how to learn math word problems, identifying the parts of the brain activated by violent images, and understanding the role of cell phones in the dating relationships of college students. Although each of those could be connected to evolutionary psychology, typically they are not.

We will revisit the place of evolutionary psychology again shortly, but for now, we ask, “What would Wundt think about all that?” In the context of writing about Wundt’s later interest in matters social and historical, his second psychology, as it is often termed, Cole (1996, p. 98) opines:

Were Wilhelm Wundt alive today to assess the attempt to use the methods of experimental/quantitative psychology to found a culture-inclusive psychology, he would certainly have the right to declare “I told you so.” After all, it was Wundt who … pointed out that individual human psychological processes are conditioned by an earlier history of the community to which they have no direct access. And it was Wundt who asserted that genetic (historical, developmental) methods are needed to deal with culturally mediated, historically contingent, “higher” psychological processes.

Both of this chapter’s authors are primarily historians of psychology (so, second psychologists, if you will). This makes us suspect in the eyes of many of our experimentally oriented, first psychology peers. When students or colleagues ask us what current project we are working on, our latest answer, “prehistoric psychology,” usually brings out grins of bemusement. When they see we are sincere and after we begin to explain that what we are really looking at is human thought and behavior from 10,000 years ago and beyond, we often get a glint of interest and a desire to learn more – especially among those first psychologists with an evolutionary approach to our discipline.

For one of us (EPK), interest in the human past began when he was 6 years old after reading Life magazine’s (1955–7) six-part series “The Epic of Man.” Since, he has often wondered how humans initially discovered fire, learned to knap flint, or developed societies. In his history of psychology textbook (Kardas, 2014), wanting to leave no historical stone unturned, he included a chapter titled “From Prehistory to Civilization” that covered well over a million years of hominid history and used Sagan’s (1977) calendar analogy to illustrate the incredibly short proportion of time that behaviorally modern humans have lived on earth. It discussed toolmaking, language, and sociality as primary human universals. It traced the evolution of humans from hunter-gathering to the rise of “modern civilizations” such as Sumer, Egypt, and Greece, where the first rumblings of psychology are usually traced. Along the way that chapter touched on Mithen’s (1996) Stone Age thinking categories: natural history and technical and social intelligences; as well as aspects of the Neolithic Revolution such as sedentism (Holmes, 2004); domestication (Diamond, 1997); urbanization (Mumford, 1956); and the invention of “modern” religion and philosophy (Russell, 1927), all topics that are not a major part of psychological research (first or second) today.

The other of us (TBH) coincidentally can also trace his interests in archaeology back to readings from age 6, but much later came to be aware of the newest “cognitive revolution” in academia (e.g., Kuhn, 1996), the one impacting archaeology. Following Cauvin (1994/2000), Schmidt (2010), Watkins (2017), and others was the assertion that the Neolithic Revolution was not caused by sedentism, domestication, and urbanization, but that those were the byproducts of a more fundamental change in our cognitive and social psychology. The rise of civilization then was as much a question for the historian of psychology as the anthropologist and archaeologist (Henley, 2018b).

This volume began then with TBH reaching out to the other two editors for a symposium on prehistoric psychology at the Southwestern Psychological Association. It was there that EPK explicitly connected the juxtaposition of evolutionary psychology and cognitive archaeology with Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie and first asked what would Wundt think about modern scientists exploring the minds and behaviors of those who lived from 10,000 to 2+ million years before present (ybp).

Wundt’s two psychologies

Wilhelm Wundt, Leipzig, and the year 1879 are accepted by virtually all psychologists as the person, place, and date involved in the founding of our discipline as an experimental science. That said, from his earliest writings Wundt expressed his belief that experimental methods would be insufficient for addressing certain matters. As Cahan and White observe (1992, p. 227):

Wundt saw his second psychology as an essential complement to his experimental psychology and this vision would ultimately lead him, in the early 1900s, to the writing of a 10-volume survey of ethnographic data about the language, myth, and customs of diverse human cultures.

Wundt believed all of psychology was obligated to appreciate and explore the developmental and social processes that led to the creation of individual consciousness. As such, Wundt saw psychology as a discipline consisting of two parts. One part, fi rst psychology, for which he remains revered, was lab-centered and used scientific methods to study presumably universal human characteristics such as sensation, perception, and physiological psychology. The other part, second psychology, culminates with his Völkerpsychologie, a term he inherited from Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (Cahan & White, 1992), and in the tradition of Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt it would be a science addressing the character of peoples (Greenwood, 1999). As time passed psychology seized upon Wundt’s experimental approach and its laboratory methods, and all but ignored his Völkerpsychologie.

Second psychology after Wundt

Both Blumenthal (1975, 1979, 1998) and Danzinger (1980) document the adoption of Wundt’s first psychology, and the neglect of his second, in the United States. Central to that story, Watson (1913, p. 163) famously sought to make psychology into “an undisputed natural science.” In other words, convert all psychology into first psychology. As a comparative psychologist he had experienced success in using animals in his research. He argued (p. 176), “The position is taken here that the behavior of man and the behavior of animals must be considered on the same plane; as being equally essential to a general understanding of behavior. It can dispense with consciousness in a psychological sense.” Watson’s position gradually gained acceptance, and in turn dominated American psychology for several decades.

By the 1930s then, a first psychology of behavior (not consciousness, as Wundt had sought) was in fashion. As Cahan and White (1992, p. 231) write, “Behavior theory, experimental psychology, and inferential statistics were brought together to form a new image of scientific psychology.” First psychology was firmly entrenched in US universities, although elements of second psychology lingered, as evidenced by early forays into social psychology (e.g., Allport) and psycholinguistics (e.g., Ogden), as well as the eventual creation of nontraditional “outsider” programs such as Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies or Yale’s Institute of Human Relations. Still, by the time of psychology’s “cognitive revolution” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was too late for second psychology to assert itself successfully back into academic psychology departments in any autonomous form. Cahan and White (p. 233) claim that “second psychology tried to materialize within the disciplinary structure of universities but the allied disciplines were already too highly structured.”

That said, many of the topics of Wundt’s second psychology (e.g., art, ethics, language, law, or religion) are all present in contemporary psychology, but as politely implied in our opening they often demonstrably stand as “second class” to first psychology (and to funding agencies’ favorites such as cognitive neuroscience). In most US psychology departments resources and prestige still align with the scientists whose work is nearest to physiology, and not the people down the hall who publish second psychology works on art, education, ethics, history, or religion.

Interestingly, another search for how to reconcile Wundt’s two psychologies took place in Russia at about the same time that Watson birthed American behaviorism. There, the likes of Bechterev, Pavlov, and Sechenov had also established an objective and behavioral first psychology. With interests at the psychological interface of art, culture, education, as well as what we would now call social cognition, Lev Vygotsky (e.g., 1930–1934/1978) additionally wrote about psychology’s own identity (Dafermos, 2014). Similar to Wundt’s erstwhile student Hugo Münsterberg, Vygotsky understood psychology as divided into two parts: a naturalistic-scientific explanatory one (what Münsterberg deemed “causal psychology”) and a philosophical-phenomenological descriptive one (what Münsterberg deemed “purposive psychology”). Vygotsky shared Wundt’s ultimate goal for a unified psychology of higher mental processes (though his death at age 37 put an untimely end to that effort). Hyman (2012, pp. 480–481) notes, “Vygotsky astutely observed that psychology in his time faced the challenge of reconciling the … individual and [the] social … This challenge is still with us.”

Evolutionary psychology as a unifying force

Since its cognitive revolution some 50+ years ago, first psychology itself has had three clear strands: behavioral, biological, and cognitive, which at times have been fiercely competitive. Staats (1991, p. 899) observed that the “result is a great and increasing diversity – many unrelated methods, findings, problems, theoretical languages, schismatic issues, and philosophical positions.” In turn, meta-theorists with an interest in describing the discipline itself, such as Sternberg (2005), have argued that it is time for psychologists to seek unification by considering phenomena from various viewpoints, setting aside narrow theoretical formulations, and measuring phenomena using multiple methods.

Although being historians requires us to note that Angell (1907) was likely the first to make the suggestion, more recently Ploeger, van der Maas, and Raijmakers (2008; see also the reply by Duntley & Buss, 2008) are among those who offer up evolutionary psychology as a possible unifier of psychology. This idea has outspoken proponents (e.g., Buss, 1995), but Ploeger remains dubious unless the scope of evolutionary psychology itself expands. As...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Editors’ introductory remarks
• Archaeological foreword: Cognitive archaeology and the prehistory of mind
• Psychological foreword: Cognitive archaeology – beyond just-so stories and WEIRD psychology
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• PART I Prehistory from the perspective of physiological and developmental psychology
• PART II Prehistory from the perspective of cognitive psychology
• PART III Prehistory from the perspective of social psychology
• PART IV Prehistory from the perspective of personality and clinical psychology
• Index