What is that thing we call “mind” in the archaeology of mind? This basic question is usually neglected or taken for granted. The job of archaeology is not to question what the mind is and does but more simply to discover and to interpret the varieties of traces left by it in the archaeological record. All that makes good sense. But there are also some hidden caveats. Cognitive archaeology struggles still in coming to terms with the nature of mental action and the boundaries of the mind. An unhelpful ontological gap separating cognition, embodied action, and materiality still persists. I believe the main source of this epistemological anxiety is a well-known assumption: we cannot dig up minds. But why is that? Where is that mind that we cannot excavate? I will argue that by neglecting cognitive ontology we have weakened the epistemological basis of archaeology and the value of the archaeological analysis. The aim of my paper is to try flesh out a possible alternative proposing a theory of material engagement. Specifically, I will attempt a comparative exploration into the deep history and ontology of mind focusing on aesthetic experience. Using various archaeological examples I will present the view of aesthetics as a situated process of enactive discovery and creative material engagement. On that view aesthetic experience is something that we do rather than something that happens to us, or in us. Rather than identifying aesthetic consciousness with its objects or use it to define and delimit some pure, detached, and autonomous realm of aesthetic contemplation, the approach taken here aims to ground aesthetic experience into the manifold interfaces of embodied material praxis in way that highlights the vitality of matter and primacy of material engagement.