[1] East of the Atlantic, the British ECA school also began in the mid-1970s with the work of archaeologists Colin Renfrew[20][21] and John Gowlett[22][23] and evolutionary primatologist William McGrew.
[31] Other early ECA pioneers include Glynn Isaac,[32][33] archaeologist Iain Davidson, and psychologist William Noble.
As a vibrant and expanding field of inquiry, "[ECA continues to] develop many of the same themes raised in the formative decade of cognitive archaeology: the validity and use of ethnoarchaeological and experimental methods; the question of continuities and discontinuities between humans and non-human species; the selection and application of theoretical frameworks, including the displacement of Piagetian theory by contemporary psychological and neuroscientific approaches to brain function and form; the incorporation of interdisciplinary data; the origin of language; the ability of construing intentionality from artifactual form; the philosophical turn in cognitive archaeology; and the riddle of intergenerational accumulation and transmission.
[36] Archaeologist Thomas Huffman defined ideational cognitive archaeology as the study of prehistoric ideology: the ideals, values, and beliefs that constitute a society's worldview.
The way that these abstract ideas are manifested through the remains these peoples have left can be investigated and debated often by drawing inferences and using approaches developed in fields such as semiotics, psychology and the wider sciences.
ICA uses the principles of sociocultural anthropology to investigate such diverse things as material symbols, the use of space, political power, and religion.
The multiple interpretations of an artifact, archaeological site or symbol are affected by the archaeologist's own experiences and ideas as well as those of the distant cultural tradition that created it.
Similarly, it would likely have described activities that were perfectly obvious to the people who created it, but the symbology employed will be different from that used today or at any other time.
For example, a prehistoric bâton de commandement served an unknown purpose, but using ICA to interpret it would involve evaluating all its possible functions using clearly defined procedures and comparisons.
[1] This rigid materialism tended to limit archaeology to finding and describing artifacts, excluding broader interpretations of their possible cognitive and cultural significance as something beyond the reach of inferential reasoning.
[42][43] While this approach was subject to legitimate criticism, Binford's efforts nonetheless inspired further development of the idea that material forms could be informative about lifestyle, and as the product of intelligent behavior, might provide insight into how and perhaps even what their makers had thought.