TOWARD A REPRESENTATION OF EARLY HUMANS’ EXPERIENCE OF SPACE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-03-15

Although archaeologists commonly describe distances and relations with respect to the Euclidean frame of reference (e.g., GIS), early hominins and humans were bound to experience spatial reality in a markedly different manner. This paper attempts to tentatively reconstruct, imagine, or simulate, through inferences and comparisons, the ways in which prehistoric populations perceived and conceived their multimodal environment and the constant transformations it underwent. Their mobility was necessarily constrained by their evolutionary endowment both physical and cognitive. Paying attention to the properties of the places these human groups selected as places of predilection and taking into account the limits of the perceptual and cognitive competencies they had evolved in view of their artifactual achievements, it is possible to figure out in a hypothetical but methodic manner the range of affects and thoughts they experienced with respect to their life world once they became bipedal. However,  rather than being merely defined by material constraints and the relentless quest for food and water, the archaeological record can yield indirect but reliable information about the significance and symbolic values they attributed to the dynamic landscapes, both terrestrial and sidereal, they inhabited and through which they survived in constant interaction with other species and natural phenomena that were woven into their narratives, paintings, and cosmologies. This approach builds upon seminal publications such as Zubrow (2005), Paliou et al (2014), and Waller (2015) , among others, to define the problem and adduce some elements towards a tentative reconstruction of early human experience of space, keeping in mind that the diversity of locations and circumstances across vast areas and over very long periods of time precludes any broad generalizations.


Author(s): Bouissac, Paul (University of Toronto)