Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

Human engagements with the world form the basis for their intelligent understanding of it. Such material engagements are not piecemeal but follow some broad set of regularities as activities in one area of life are picked up and developed in another. Sweeping changes in life processes, which we might see as bursts of creativity, occur across areas of life we might label as secular or pragmatic and the sacred, calling into question such distinctions. In this paper, I follow the case (...) of the emergence of the early medieval village and parish in England from around AD 750 onwards to examine how new cognitive landscapes emerge and what their entailments are more generally. I conclude by looking at the links between material engagement, identity and novelty. (shrink)