Archaeologists have tried to reconstruct patterns of thought meaning, and ideas, using, theories of structuralism, cognition and ideology. Case studies involving each of the theories are described, and the strengths and weakness of their application to archaeological data are presented. Structuralism is found to yield substantial examples with well worked treatments of archaeological data. These examples tend to ignore economic context, however, materilism, especially neo marxism, contains thorough definitions of ideology that may be useful to archaeology because they preserve economic context. However such definitions are new to the field and presently offer few well worked examples of how to handle archaeological data.