Four heuristics for theory selection in evolutionary cognitive archaeology

Understanding the minds of past populations through their material remains presents cognitive archaeologists with a range of inferential challenges. One of these is theory selection: which cognitive models should we choose for archaeological analysis, and why? In this article, we outline three problems facing researchers performing this task, and recommend four heuristics designed to mitigate the extent of those problems: consilience, theoretical pluralism, sample diversity, and robustness. The archaeologist who selects a cognitive model that does well against these heuristics stands to better epistemically licence their inference from archaeological evidence to (some aspect of) hominin cognition in the deep past.