  What can relics of the past tell us about the thoughts and beliefs of the
people who invented and used them? Recent collaborations at the frontier of
archaeology, anthropology, and cognitive science are culminating in speculative
but nevertheless increasingly sophisticated efforts to unravel how modern human
cognition came about. By considering objects within their archaeological
context, we have begun to piece together something of the way of life of people
who inhabited particular locales, which in turn reflects their underlying
thought processes.
