As the title suggests, it is the purpose of this chapter to question the assumption that nomads and their material remains are inaccessible to archaeologists. Nomads need not be archaeologically invisible. At the same time they do not constitute an archaeological ‘culture’ in the Childean sense. Paradoxically therefore, although the artifacts and campsites used by ancient nomads need not lie beyond the capacity of modern archaeology, there may be no simple means by which these are distinguishable from the productions of more settled communities. The traveller in the more isolated parts of the Near East should not be surprised to see groups of migrating nomads passing through villages whose inhabitants dress in the same manner as the nomads, speak the same dialect, employ the same range of household utensils, possess the same species of domestic animals and, in some cases, claim the same tribal affiliation. Differences there certainly are, but these are often ideological, organizational and economic rather than ‘cultural’.

Nomadism and the integration of pastoralism and agriculture

There has been much discussion concerning the differences between pastoralism and agriculture, the desert and the sown (Nelson 1973); with much stress being laid on either the complementarity of pastoral and agricultural products or the conflicts generated through competition for resources. Much of this misses the point. Pastoralism and agriculture differ not only in the things produced but more fundamentally in the nature of the productive process itself. While both modes of subsistence in a Near Eastern context are subject to large fluctuations in productivity (Adams 1974), the manner in which each system responds to these fluctuations is quite different.

The organization of pastoral and agricultural production

Whereas fluctuations in the level of agricultural production tend to be buffered and absorbed by the stable structure of a sedentary community, similar fluctuations in pastoral production are amplified throughout the organization of a pastoral community.

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.

We are all experts at decision making. After all, we have been practising the art for most, perhaps all, of our lives. Each of us knows that some decisions are easy to make and some difficult, and also that sometimes we have made the right and sometimes the wrong choice. Occasionally we reflect upon a decision and how we arrived at a particular choice. Most often this occurs when we appear to have been foolish. Why ever did I choose to become an archaeologist? What made me choose to study decision making? Why on earth did I decide to write/read this book? When doing this, we tend to take the decision process apart and look at the information we had available to us, what now appears to have been missing and how we thought that some items carried more weight than others. Often we remain uncertain as to why we made a particular choice. Why did I decide to be an archaeologist? Well, perhaps because I thought that seeking after the roots of human culture would be intellectually fulfilling. Alternatively it may have been the thought of digging for buried treasure in the sun with endless supplies of wine and good food.

One of the unique characteristics of the human species is the possession of highly developed capacities for learning, decision making and problem solving, as T.S. Eliot reminds us. These result in a behavioural flexibility unparalleled in any other species. Although such capacities often require a social context for their use, they reside in the individual. Quite simply, it is these that constitute the source of cultural behaviour. It is remarkable, therefore, that archaeology, a discipline with the human species as its centre and which claims a pre-eminent role for understanding cultural behaviour, has paid scant attention to the processes of learning and decision making by individuals.

How can we gain an adequate understanding of what happened in the past, and why it happened, without making explicit reference to people taking decisions on the basis of accumulated knowledge between alternative courses of action? Certainly individual decision makers cannot be divorced from their social contexts and are part of natural communities, but it is the individual who perceives, thinks and decides. To make a flint arrowhead in one shape rather than another, to hunt deer rather than to collect molluscs, to paint rather than inscribe upon a pot are all decisions taken by individuals upon which our conception of ‘cultures’ and trajectories of social and economic change are imposed. Such decisions underlie all processes highlighted in recent archaeological thought, whether they be intensification and population pressure or core-periphery networks and peer-polity interaction. These, and other processes, are insufficiently described and understood when lacking reference to the individuals involved.

At this stage in my study it is time to turn away from some of the terminology I have introduced and follow Ingold back to basics: ‘the hunter and his spear’ (1981, 1986: 1-15). Let us take his advice and consider the simple situation of a lone hunter out in the forest and taking decisions about which game to hunt. It is also time to make life a little more complicated by addressing the archaeological record. Has my polemic as to the need to invoke individual decision making for adequate explanations in archaeology been simply rhetoric and have my lengthy discussions of ecological, psychological and ethnographic data been distractions from my stated aim? Or are we now sufficiently equipped with a qualitative model of decision making to make progress in explaining the variability and patterning in the archaeological record? Now is the time to tell!

It is, of course, the latter. Well, it nearly is. I believe we have an appropriate theoretical framework, but so far lack the methodological tools to operationalise this with the mute stones and bones of the archaeological record. In this case study I am going to use mathematical modelling and computer simulation to play this role. In doing so we must heed Bertrand Russell and view these methods in thier correct guise. I do not pretend that they will provide any magic answers.

My intention in this work is to argue that a focus on the individual decision maker is the stance for developing adequate explanations in archaeology. Let me make the tentative assumption that you have found something of value in my study of Mesolithic foraging and society, that you feel my focus on individual decision making has indeed made a contribution to explaining the variability and patterning in that archaeological record, whether or not you agree with my specific arguments. However, I can hear you asking if this was so as a result simply of the particular character of those data rather than of any inherent virtue in my individualistic eco-psychological decision-making approach. Can we find the individual and use our growing understanding of decision-making processes when we have an archaeological record of a markedly different character, for instance when faunal assemblages are large and complex, deriving from ‘multiple authors’ (Gamble 1984: 239) and co-operative hunting and without the fine chronological resolution of the Mesolithic? And what if our principal problem does not immediately refer to hunting behaviour but to cognition? Does an individual decision-making approach enable us to develop our studies of, say, prehistoric art and ritual? My answer is of course an emphatic yes. To demonstrate this, I will take a step backwards from the Mesolithic to the late glacial and tackle problems posed by Upper Palaeolithic art.

Archaeologists studying the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic may use the ethnographic record of historically documented hunter-gatherers in a variety of ways. Some seek cross-cultural generalisations for theory building or hypothesis testing. Others focus on the relationships between behaviour and its material consequences for middle-range research. Alternatively archaeologists may use it simply as a source of analogies for supporting inferences drawn about past behaviour. When we have written and photographic records of hunter-gatherers ‘in action’ it would indeed be perverse to ignore them. But it would be equally foolish to forget that we are seeing modern and not ‘Stone Age’ society.

It is readily apparent that historically documented hunter-gatherers provide poor analogies for the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherers represented by the archaeological record alone. Often these are dependent upon state societies; they make extensive use of modern technology; hunting and gathering may be pastimes rather than providing essential sustenance and are often pursued only in response to the goading of anthropologists. Some, perhaps many, ‘modern’ foragers have switched from an agricultural lifestyle. As a result the foraging problems they face, the goals they choose, the information sources exploited, the way such information is processed, and the consequences which may occur, probably bear little if any relationship to those of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

This is all true but of little consequence for my ends. One of my principal arguments is that the decision-making processes of any group or individual possess unique characteristics whether our subjects are alive today or forgotten in prehistory.

This book has been developed from my Ph.D. thesis which I completed in December 1987. Yet its roots lie earlier and can be pinpointed to two not unrelated events. The first was on a hot and sticky day during the summer of 1978.1 sat with my brother in a shady spot near Les Eyzies and pondered the paintings of Font de Gaume after the first of many visits to that cave. How mysterious the prehistoric past appeared. What beauty the hunters must have found in their icy world, and within themselves, to make such art. The second occurred a couple of years later in the midst of a Yorkshire winter - the ice age had returned with a vengeance! Now an undergraduate at Sheffield University, I sat reading in my damp bedsit and was transfixed by Transformations, Renfrew and Cooke's book on mathematical approaches to culture change. I understood as little of the mathematics as I did of the French guide's descriptions of the cave paintings. But what an intriguing idea! Can the coldness of equations and computer programmes really help in studying the complexities of culture and the warmth of the human spirit as so perfectly expressed in the smudge of ochre and mark from a burnt stick on the walls of Font de Gaume? Now sitting in my positively post-glacial Cambridge study and with this book before me, I can still confess to ignorance, but also to a continuing fascination with the idea.

For having the chance to explore this idea I must first thank those who taught me archaeology at Sheffield, particularly Robin Dennell, Andrew Fleming, Robin Torrence and Richard Hodges.