A while ago in a fleeting Mastodon post, I came across the term cognitive archeology. A term that immediately sparked interest. It also mentioned the 2019 anthology Squeezing Minds From Stones, which contains a range of chapters that sparked my interest even more, I saw all kinds of associations with other things I’m interested in. Cognitive archeology is about what prehistoric archeological finds can tells us about the cognitive processes of the humans leaving that archeological record behind. What do stone tools tell us about the people who made them? What theory of mind would people have that set traps for animals?

Already early on in my blogging I remarked in a 2004 blogpost that we’ve been offloading information and knowledge cues to our environment, like marks on bones, since the days of Cro Magnon. And that using information strategies and PKM as a way of turning information overload into an abundance is just going through a next iteration of the same. In the past months, reading Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly, I learned how oral traditions and indeed stone age cultures create a variety of mnemonic devices and methods, including Stonehenge as a stone age memory palace. Cognitive offloading was one of the themes last week at the European PKM Summit, where Marieke van Vliet presented her views on cognitive offloading bad and good in the age of AI.

I had collected the abstracts of all chapters in this book, but realised I wanted to read the whole thing. However this is one of those academic publications with prohibitive pricing, so I hesitated and looked for a cheaper option. In the end I ordered it from Oxford University Press directly. It arrived yesterday and I’m very much looking forward to exploring it.

The book on our garden table