The publication of the first issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography (JCH) essentially aimed to mark the birth of a new interdisciplinary field, which is willing to take on the challenge of exploring how people in past societies thought and behaved. Cognitive Historiography thus becomes the latest addition to a number of inter-disciplinary areas which combine a subject matter from the humanities with methods and theories from the cognitive sciences, such as Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Anthropology , Cognitive Archaeology, Cognitive Semiotics, and others. In what follows I will offer a critical assessment of Cognitive Historiography as an emergent field, and particularly as it is represented in the inaugural issue of JCH. For someone who works between the humanities and the cognitive sciences as I do, the emergence of this new research area is a very exciting development. For if the humanities are to survive in the modern academia, they need to keep up with theoretical and methodological developments in other disciplines, and certainly with scientific approaches to the study of human nature. Postmodernism has had its run, but in its obsessive focus on deconstruction it forgot to be constructive, failing to make any incremen-tal contribution to our empirical knowledge of the world. In its extreme version, it dragged many humanistic disciplines down a stagnating path, infusing them with a nihilistic and self-defeating, not to mention deeply 1. Dimitris Xygalatas holds a joined appointment between the Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University. He has previously held positions at Princeton and Masaryk University, where he served as Director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion.