9 - Conclusion

Summary

Cultural behaviour derives from capacities for learning, decision making and problem solving. As biological endowments these reside in the individual. Consequently, explanations for cultural behaviour require explicit reference to decision making by individuals. Bold statements indeed. Perhaps safe in a purely theoretical paper or at the end of a book, but I foolishly made these in my introduction! Did the archaeological studies live up to such extravagant claims? It is not for me to judge.

To conclude this work I want briefly to review my two archaeological studies and draw out the type of prehistoric world I am envisaging. I also wish to emphasise certain elements of the archaeological approach I have advocated.

I have suggested that explanations in archaeology can be improved by explicit reference to the individual decision maker. However, I have not stipulated that this should take any particular form. Indeed, I myself have been rather flexible. In my study of Mesolithic foraging I built a model for decision making by an individual and used that as a methodological tool. This is perhaps the most explicit reference. In the Upper Palaeolithic study, however, I concentrated on understanding the ecological and historical context in which the decision makers would have been operating and then, using a conceptual rather than a quantitative model for decision making, made reference to individuals tackling patch-choice problems. We might also note that each study focused on rather different elements of the decision-making process. When studying Mesolithic foraging, I concentrated on information acquisition from past experience and other individuals. But in the Upper Palaeolithic study greatest attention was paid to cue use and the creative manipulation of past experience.