Creativity is a quality that is highly valued, but not always well understood. Studies of creativity frequently focus on the modern era, yet creativity has always been part of human history. It is impossible to understand the development of the new – the imagination, ideas, and innovations that form our past – ithout invoking creativity.

At the same time, however, the archaeological investigation of creativity is frequently perceived to be somewhat romantic and perhaps even impossible. Despite an explosion in studies of creativity in other disciplines (e.g. Bohm 1996; Sternberg 1998; Boden 2003; Hallam and Ingold 2007), creativity is often seen to be a disembodied, almost magical quality of individuals that is responsible for radical self-expression and uniqueness (Boden 2009; Gibson 2010; Wilf 2011). It is an intangible ‘something’ valued in and of itself as a kind of intellectual property (Thrift 2000). This reflects a view of the subject in which creativity is often understood in terms of individual (often artistic) ‘creative genius’ (Boas 1955), where personal expression has become one of the cornerstones of modern Western capitalist culture (Taylor 1989; Wilf 2011). By locating creativity solely in the mind of the exceptional person and outside the material realm, such a view of creativity would indeed seem to place it beyond archaeological study. As a discipline, archaeology struggles to identify the work of individuals. Instead it has a strong emphasis on social structures and actions constructed through the identification of patterns in material culture. A non-materialist, individualist view of creativity, therefore, does not chime with archaeological investigation.

An alternative view of creativity identifies it in terms of shared cross-cultural cognitive processes in past and present that sit at the heart of what it means to be human.