Communicating From Prehistory: Trust, Time, Number and Distance in Sharing Meanings

Beginning from work on the origins of language - defined as communication using symbols - this paper reviews aspects of communication as it may be looked at by an archaeologist: non-human communication; multiple stages in language emergence; personal and landscape marking; writing; the alphabet; art; changing aspects of transporting communicated meanings; printing; visual communication; electronic communication. This approach to the history of communication raises several issues about the trustworthiness of communication between emitter and receiver for each change in the mode of communication. One of the implications of the well-documented cognitive implications of writing and printing, is that we cannot necessarily assume that interpretations of meaning have remained equally accessible at all times in the past. Archaeologists typically infer meanings from indexical signs of the past - including those relating to the various historical changes in communication. This may run the risk of assuming that the cognitive abilities required to interpret signs have not been influenced by the processes of change in communication.