Lambros Malafouris

Lambros Malafouris is a British cognitive archaeologist who has pioneered the application of concepts from the philosophy of mind to the material record. He is Professor of Cognitive and Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He is known for Material Engagement Theory, the idea that material objects in the archaeological record are part of the ancient human mind.

Education

Malafouris completed his doctorate in archaeology in 2005 at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Colin Renfrew.

Research

Working with Renfrew, Malafouris developed an approach to the study of the human mind, past and present, known as Material Engagement Theory (MET). MET has three central tenets: (1) Cognition is extended and enacted because material forms are part of the mind and cognition is the interaction between brains, bodies, and material forms. (2) Materiality has agency because it is able to influence change in brains and behaviors. (3) Meaning (signification) emerges through the enactive engagement of material forms. These tenets provide an archaeological framework that "offers a new way of understanding the nature of cognition itself" and establishes "the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process." Important concepts developed by Malafouris include:

• metaplasticity, the idea that the plastic human mind “is embedded and inextricably enfolded within a plastic” material culture
• thinging, the idea that humans think with and through material things

Honors

In 2006, Malafouris was selected as a Balzan Research Fellow in cognitive archaeology at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge.

Selected works

Authored books

• Malafouris, Lambros (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262019194.
• Koukouti, Maria-Danae; Malafouris, Lambros (2020). An Anthropological Guide to the Art and Philosophy of Mirror Gazing. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781350202634.

Edited volumes

• Malafouris, Lambros; Knappet, Carl, eds. (2008). Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Springer. ISBN 9780387747101.
• Renfrew, Colin; Frith, Chris; Malafouris, Lambros, eds. (2009). The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199561995.
• Malafouris, Lambros; Renfrew, Colin, eds. (2010). The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. ISBN 9781902937519.

Special journal issues

• Malafouris, Lambros; Renfrew, Colin, eds. (2008). "Steps to a 'Neuroarchaeology' of Mind". Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 18–19.
• Malafouris, Lambros; Gosden, Chris; Overmann, Karenleigh A., eds. (2014). "Creativity, Cognition & Material Culture". Pragmatics and Cognition. 22.
• Malafouris, Lambros, ed. (2019). "Mind and Material Engagement". Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 18.
• Idhe, Don; Malafouris, Lambros, eds. (2019). "Homo faber Revisited: Postphenomenology and Material Engagement". Philosophy & Technology. 32.
• Wynn, Thomas; Overmann, Karenleigh A.; Malafouris, Lambros, eds. (2021). "4E Cognition in the Lower Palaeolithic". Adaptive Behavior. 29.

Articles

• Malafouris, Lambros, “Beads for a Plastic Mind: The ‘Blind Man’s Stick’ (BMS) Hypothesis and the Active Nature of Material Culture”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 18 (2008): 401–414.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Between Brains, Bodies and Things: Tectonoetic Awareness and the Extended Self”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, vol. 363 (2008): 1993–2002.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarchaeology”, Journal of Anthropological Sciences, vol. 88 (2010): 49–72.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “The Brain-Artefact Interface (BAI): A Challenge for Archaeology and Cultural Neuroscience”, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, vol. 5 (2010): 264–273.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Metaplasticity and the Primacy of Material Engagement”, Time and Mind, vol. 8 (2015): 351–371.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Mind and Material Engagement”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 18 (2019): 1–17.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Thinking as ‘Thinging’: Psychology With Things”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 29 (2020): 3–8.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “How Does Thinking Relate to Tool Making?”, Adaptive Behavior, vol. 29 (2021): 107–121.
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Mark Making and Human Becoming”, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 28 (2021): 95–119.

Book chapters

• Malafouris, Lambros, “At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency”, in Carl Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (editors), Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Perspective, Springer (2008).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Grasping the Concept of Number: How Did the Sapient Mind Move Beyond Approximation?”, in Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley (editors), The Archaeology of Measurement: Comprehending Heaven, Earth and Time in Ancient Societies, Cambridge University Press (2010).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Knapping Intentions and the Marks of the Mental”, in Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (editors), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (2010).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Linear B as Distributed Cognition: Excavating a Mind not Limited by the Skin”, in Helle Juel Jensen et al. (editors), Excavating the Mind: Cross-sections through Culture, Cognition and Materiality, University of Aarhus (2012).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “On Human Becoming and Incompleteness: A Material Engagement Approach to the Study of Embodiment in Evolution and Culture”, in Gregor Etzelmüller and ‎Christian Tewes (editors), Embodiment in Evolution and Culture, Mohr Siebeck (2016).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Play and Ritual: Some Thoughts from a Material Culture-Perspective”, in Colin Renfrew et al. (editors), Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies, Cambridge University Press (2017).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Bringing Things to Mind: 4Es and Material Engagement”, in Albert Newen et al. (editors), The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, Oxford University Press (2018).
• Malafouris, Lambros, “Beyond Biology and Culture: Cross-disciplinary Reflections on the Universality and Diversity of the Human Mind”, in Balzan Papers, Vol. 3, Olschki Publications (2020).

See also

• Neuroarchaeology – Archaeological sub-discipline
• Neuroesthetics – Sub-discipline of empirical aesthetics