Mind, Time, and Material Engagement Page 1 of 18 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford; date: 24 July 2020 Print Publication Date: Jun 2020 Subject: History, Social and Cultural History Online Publication Date: May 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341764.013.27 Mind, Time, and Material Engagement Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture Edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter Abstract and Keywords The study of material culture is changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming. This chapter proposes that a fo cus on the phenomenon of material engagement provides a productive means to situate and integrate evolutionary, historical, and developmental processes. The material engage ment approach brings with it a relational conceptualization of human cognition as pro foundly embodied, enacted, extended, and distributed. This conceptualisation opens the way to, on the one hand, reanimate the importance of history and development in the study of human cognitive evolution, and on the other hand, allow a new approach to his torical analysis, one in which minds and things play a more central role. Specifically, we explore some of the implications of the view that humans and things coconstitute each other for understanding the processes by which human cognitive abilities develop and change in different cultural and historical contexts. Keywords: material engagement, mind, things, plasticity, evolution, time, human becoming, material agency IN recent years, it has become almost commonplace in archaeology to declare that our social and cognitive life is not just mediated by the material things we make and use but is entangled with and very often constituted by them. 1 How exactly is this changing the way we perceive and study the past, as well as how we understand the process of human becoming? More important, how is this new emphasis on materiality, and the recognition it brings with it that human life cannot be understood apart from its material entailments, affecting historians’ understanding of material culture? As archaeologists, we are espe cially interested in the phenomenon of material engagement 2 and the various social on tologies 3 and material agencies 4 that this engagement enacts and substantiates in differ ent cultural contexts. The implications of the view that humans and things coconstitute each other specifically are important for understanding the developmental and evolution ary processes by which human cognitive abilities develop and change in different cultural and historical contexts. In particular, the argument for the constitutive intertwining of mind with the material world brings with it a new conception of human cognitive evolu tion that is grounded in situated learning, development, and thus historical and cultural