Professor Lambros Malafouris

Research Profile

Current Activities

My primary interest lies in the study of the interaction between cognition and material culture. I am studying the effects of materiality in human cognitive life (past and present). A major aspect of my work has been the development of Material Engagement Theory (MET) which forms the basis of my first authored book, How Things Shape the Mind (MIT Press) (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-things-shape-mind). I have been addressing empirical and theoretical questions on topics extending from early stone tools and personal decoration, to the emergence of symbolic technologies of more recent periods, to the latest innovations in digital techniques and media.

My approach to research has been intra- and cross-disciplinary. I am using the insights that we gain from the archaeological and anthropological study of material culture to establish a critical dialogue with the broader field of cognitive sciences about the boundaries, the ontology, and the uniqueness of human intelligence and its evolution. I have been trying to understand and to articulate the basic principles of the creative entanglement between the plasticity of the human mind and the plasticity of the material forms and techniques that we make (metaplasticity).

I am currently Principal Investigator of HANDMADE: Understanding Creative Gesture in Pottery Making (https://handmade.web.ox.ac.uk/home) funded through a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. The HANDMADE project is focusing on the cognitive ecology and poetics of clay. HANDMADE attempts a comparative anthropological exploration of the creative dialogue between hands and clay through multi-sited participant observation in several traditional ceramic workshops spread around mainland Greece and the Islands.

Links

Teaching

Undergraduate teaching

I am teaching undergraduate tutorials in Archaeology and Anthropology (both at prelims and finals) and I am co-Director of Studies for undergraduates at Hertford College.

Graduate teaching

I am teaching the module on cognitive archaeology on the MSc Archaeology course. I am also supervising research students in the general areas of Cognitive, Anthropological and Theoretical archaeology. I welcome enquiries from individuals wishing to undertake doctoral or post-doctoral research in those fields, especially from students with an interest in cognitive archaeology and material engagement theory.

Publications
Doctoral Supervision

I welcome enquiries and I am happy to supervise doctoral or post-doctoral research in the general areas of cognitive, anthropological and theoretical archaeology. Especially from students with an interest in material engagement theory, the relationship cognition and material culture, the anthropology of technics, creativity, making, self and the body, human becoming, material semiotics, and the effects of materiality on mental health.

Current students

Cretan Hieroglyphic in process: Rethinking the ecology of writing in the Cretan Bronze Age
Arthur Coppée | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Digital Technology, Cultural Heritage, and the Creation of Landscapes of Power.
Savannah Milton | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Lambros Malafouris and John Pouncett
Weaving Material Mind Maps: Cognitive Networks Based on the Semiotic Variants of Dolmens on the Korean Peninsula
Hoin Song | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Lambros Malafouris and John Pouncett
Rethinking the Chaine Operatoir Approach: Agency, Cognition, and Temporality in Bronze Age Aegean Pottery Production
Katie Slaughter | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Potting in the Pandemic: Investigating pottery skill development and its affective impact in COVID-19 Britain
Catherine O'Brien | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Aesthetic Preference, Cognitive Ecologies, and Pleistocene Lithics: Towards an Enactive Evolutionary Aesthetics
Jim Hicks | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Style as Memory: A Cross-disciplinary Approach to the Knossian Kamares Style
Emanuele Prezioso | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
The role of materiality in the formation of social memory: Studying the life histories of the Mycenaean Shaft Grave stelae
Chaoying Wang | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Clayful Phenomenology and Material Engagement: explorations in contemporary cognitive archaeology
Paul March | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris

Past students

In the Spirit of Engagement: Memories and the sensorium in Algonquin canoe building
Jonathan Goldner-Jacobs (2022) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Primate Archaeology: Comparative models for the evolution of primate technical cognition through tool use
Hannah Mosley (2021) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Communities of Practice Theory in Egyptian Archaeology: A Case Study for Its Application with Old Kingdom Sealings and Seal Impressions from Giza
Siobhan Shinn (2021) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Lambros Malafouris and Paul Collins
The Marble Kyklos: Social Cognition, Social Complexity and Material Engagement in the Aegean Bronze Age
Alexander Aston (2020) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Prehistoric Aesthetics: An Ontology of Stone Age Art from the Lower Palaeolithic until the Neolithic
Brecht Govaerts (2020) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden
Affect and materiality in therapeutic spaces. A contemporary archaeology of hospices
John Harries (2020) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisor: Lambros Malafouris
Materiality in numerical cognition: Material Engagement Theory and the counting technologies of the Ancient Near East
Karenleigh Overmann (2016) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Lambros Malafouris and Chris Gosden
The Prehistory of Material Signification: Tracing the Nature and Emergence of Early Body Ornamentation through a Pragmatic and Enactive Theory of Cognitive Semiotics
Antonios Iliopoulos (2015) ORA | DPhil Archaeology | Supervisors: Michael Petraglia and Lambros Malafouris

Key words: materiality, wellbeing, cognitive archaeology, anthropological archaeology, archaeological theory, self and the body, creativity and human becoming