Metaplasticity and the Primacy of Material Engagement

Humans (not just brains) have been evolving as relational self-conscious beings that undergo situated ontogenetic histories and lead creative cognitive lives. More than just evolving (in the restricted Darwinian sense of variation under natural selection), we have been altering our own developmental paths by making and changing the material means by which we engage the world (in a more extensive sense that blends Bergsonian creative evolution with niche-construction). We create things that very often alter the ecology of our minds, re-configure the boundaries of our thinking and the ways we make sense of the world. The plasticity of the mind is embedded and inextricably enfolded with the plasticity of culture – I call that metaplasticity. This ongoing relational transaction at the heart of human becoming has long been recognized in archaeology, philosophy, and anthropology. It also seems natural in view of the way materiality conspicuously envelops our everyday life and thinking. Yet our understanding of the anthropological and evolutionary implications of this seemingly unique human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our minds is severely constrained by several inherited conceptual splits that structure the way we think about the process of thinking in archaeology, anthropology, and beyond. This article explores how a neuroarchaeology of mind grounded on a theory of material engagement can help us to understand the changing prosthetic alignments (communicative, epistemic, or ontological) between brains, bodies, and things. Doing so, I want to highlight what is typically cast in the shadow and to re-instantiate the cognitive life of things and the priority of material engagement in the making and evolution of human intelligence.