Semiotic Investigations into Early Forms of Symbolism and Language

Understanding early traces of symbolism and the origins of language is challenging given the difficult access to the psychological and cognitive operations which underlay them from the archaeological record. In order to address this issue, we propose a semiotic framework based on the notion of representational medium. This concept helps bridging the gap between ancient and modern semiotic activities by extending analyses of modern media. It also leads us to highlight a possible evolutionary trajectory to modern symbols.