By Frederick L. Coolidge, Professor, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA; and Apeksha Srivastava, Doctoral Candidate, Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, India.

“Archaeologists must solidly define what a symbol is …” (Coolidge, 2023).

Archaeology is a field that traces the human past through material remains. Symbols are an important part of this process and broadly represent a meaning or an idea for something within a culture. However, the terms symbol, symbolism, and/or symbolic thinking are rarely, if ever, defined in the archaeological literature. Further, this literature is virtually dominated by polymath Charles Sanders Peirce’s sign delineations among icons, indexes, and symbols. An icon, such as a photograph, physically resembles the represented concept or object. An index highlights the evidence of the concept or object being represented, such as an image of smoke to indicate fire. A symbol has no resemblance between the concept or object being represented and the sign’s form (words, sound, facial expression, etc.). Symbol connections are learned, as in the case of sounds, numbers, alphabets, and words. Peirce (who died in 1914) differentiated among these three kinds of signs, which have no relationship to cognitive complexity, in the late 1800s. However, many archaeologists act as if symbols represent the highest level of cognitive complexity. Yet, the simplest organisms like flatworms or cognitively more complex animals like dogs can be classically conditioned to recognize them. Specifically, a dog can learn a bell is a symbol of food when there is no actual resemblance between the bell and the food. Further, Pavlov found that dogs could respond to buzzers and other stimuli heralding food.

The point of this article is that the term symbol should no longer be discussed in Peircian terms in archaeology. It is imperative to recognize that symbols in archaeology must be interpreted in terms of a cognitive hierarchy. Thus, a bell absolutely qualifies as a symbol, but it is the most........

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