Acheulean cognition

This project examines Acheulean bifaces in order to assess the evolution of cognition over the course of the 1.5 million year duration of this culture.

Acheulean bifaces

Related outputs

  • Garcia Medrano, P., Shipton, C., White, M., Ashton, N. Acheulian diversity in Britain (MIS15-13) from the standardization to the regionalization of technology.  Frontiers in Earth Sciences
  • Muller, A., Shipton, C., Clarkson, C. (2022) Stone toolmaking difficulty and the evolution of hominin technological skills. Scientific Reports 12: 5883
  • Shipton, C. Predetermined refinement: the earliest Levallois of the Kapthurin Formation. (2022) Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 5: 4 (2022)
  • Shipton, C., White M. (2020) Handaxe types, colonization waves, and social norms in the British Acheulean.  Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 31: 102352
  • Shipton, C., Clarkson, C., Cobden, R. (2019) Were Acheulean bifaces deliberately made symmetrical? Archaeological and experimental evidence.  Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29: 65-79
  • Shipton, C.  Biface knapping skill in the East African Acheulean: progressive trends and random walks. (2018) African Archaeological Review 35: 107-131
  • Muller, A., Clarkson, C., Shipton, C. (2017) Measuring behavioural and cognitive complexity in lithic technology throughout human evolution.  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 48: 166-180
  • Shipton, C., Nielsen, M., Di Vincenzo, F. (2021) The Acheulean origins of normativity.  In Killin, A. and Hermansson, S. (eds.) Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy, pp.197-212. Berlin: Synthese.
  • Shipton, C. (2020) The unity of Acheulean culture.  In Groucutt, H. (ed.) Culture History and Convergent Evolution: Can We Detect Populations in Prehistory?  pp. 13-27.  London: Springer
  • Shipton, C. (2019) Three stages in the evolution of human cognition: normativity, recursion, and abstraction.  In Henley, T., Rossano, M., and Kardas, E. (eds.) Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology: Psychology in Prehistory pp. 153-173.  London: Routledge
  • Shipton, C. (2019) The evolution of social transmission in the Acheulean.  In Coolidge, F. & Overmann, K. (eds.) Squeezing Minds from Stones pp. 332-354.  Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • Shipton, C., Nielsen, M. (2018) The acquisition of knapping skill in the Acheulean.  In Di Vincenzo, F. & Di Paolo, L.D. (eds.) The Evolution of Primate Social Cognition pp. 283-297.  Dordrecht: Springer

Links

Project Leader

  • Ceri Shipton (UCL)

Project Partners

  • The British Museum

Further information