Overmann Karenleigh A., Coolidge Frederick L. (eds.) Squeezing Minds From Stones: Cognitive Archaeology and the Evolution of the Human Mind

Oxford University Press, 2019. — 542 p.This anthology celebrates 40 years of an archaeology of mind, the investigation of how the modern human mind emerged, as discerned through material artifacts such as the stone tools used throughout the Paleolithic and the hunting technologies and numbers found in the Neolithic. The contributions by established and emerging scholars cover a wide variety of topics in cognitive archaeology, including the evolutionary bases for cognition, how stone tools may reflect the brains and minds of their makers, when and how stone tools move from the practical to the aesthetic, and the social implications of archaeological artifacts and their relationships to attention, language, working memory, materiality, and numbers. The volume concludes with some thoughts by archaeologist Thomas Wynn, one of the field’s most distinguished pioneers, on how cognitive archaeology contributes to our understanding of human cognition and mainstream cognitive science.Karenleigh A. Overmann has a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Oxford, as well as a master's in psychology and bachelor's in anthropology, philosophy, and English from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). She is a founding member of the faculty of the UCCS Center for Cognitive Archaeology, and in June 2018 she began an MSCA individual fellowship at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her primary research investigates numeracy and literacy as complex cultural systems that emerge through sustained interactions between brains, behaviors, and material forms. Her previous career was in the U.S. Navy, where she performed communications-electronics work as an enlisted Radioman before earning a commission under the Limited Duty Officer program; she retired with 25 years active service in 2003.
Professor Frederick L. Coolidge has a Ph.D. from the University of Florida and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Clinical Neuropsychology. He is a three-time Fulbright Fellow recipient and has three teaching awards and two research awards from the University of Colorado. He was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar to Oxford University (Keble College) in 2015 and Visiting Scholar to the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar from 2014-2018.