This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

这是一篇关于商标制作和人类成为的论文。我会问商标有什么作用？它们如何表示？商标在人类的发展和人类智力的发展中扮演什么角色？从任何单一学科或本体论的角度来看，这些问题都无法有效解决。但是，这些问题使考古学做出了巨大贡献。它们也是重要的问题，即使不是最不重要的一点，因为早期标记的证据构成了“认知”（在该词的“现代”表示意义上）所青睐的考古标记。在本文中，我想指出，考古学偏向将标记制作视为符号表示的潜在指标，这常常使我们对认知生活的其他更基本的维度以及这些标记作为物质符号的代理权视而不见。我将利用活跃的认知科学和物质参与理论来说明，早期标记，例如著名的Blombos洞穴雕刻，首先是非表现形式的动觉动力学产物，可让人们参与并发现人类的符号学能力。标志开创了活性材料意义的新可能性。我还将指出考古学在思考需要克服的“认知”方式上的一些常见陷阱。