We see today a growing interest in cognitive approaches to archaeology, a genuine desire to reach back for the mental templates that underlie human behaviour. While this interest is surely commendable, we should guard against two possible negative outcomes. One such outcome would be the conversion of cognitive archaeology into a fad or a narrow speciality that ignores all other aspects of prehistory. The other would be the delusion that our search for the ancient mind is a recent advance for which our generation is solely responsible.

To avoid the first pitfall, we prefer to speak not of ‘cognitive archaeology’ but rather of ‘holistic archaeology’, a discipline in which cognitive variables would be given equal weight with ecological, economic and sociopolitical variables. As far back as 1976 we called for ‘a framework for analysis which is neither a mindless ecology nor a glorification of mind divorced from the land’ (Flannery and Marcus 1976a: 383).

To avoid the second pitfall, we remind ourselves that many previous generations of archaeologists were just as interested in topics such as ideology, cosmology, iconography and religion (e.g. Caso 1945, 1958; Thompson 1950, 1966, 1970, 1973). Consider, for example, the brilliant writings of Frankfort et al. (1946) on the mind of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia nearly half a century ago.