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.

Now comes the crunch – to make a connection between the simulated archaeological record, i.e. the faunal assemblages generated by the computer model, and the real world. I'm not sure which of these might be termed the prose and which the passion but certainly if a connection is made the value of both will be exalted! This connection must, however, be meaningful. To show that the computer model can produce patterning which is similar to that in real assemblages is insufficient in itself. Many very different models may produce patterns which cannot be distinguished between – like the echoes in a Marabar cave – and all of which may bear a resemblance to the real data. This is the problem of equiflnality, which haunts those using simulation and has scared some away. Similarly, we can never be absolutely sure that patterns in faunal assemblages are not purely the result of preservation and excavation. My solution to these problems is that we must examine whether the model producing the simulated pattern, and in this case the type of decision making that is implied, is useful for explaining other aspects of the same archaeological record which initially appear unconnected with faunal assemblages.

In his poem Seamus Heaney reflects upon his father digging potatoes: By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.’ He, however, chose to work with the pen. Times had changed for the Heaney family as indeed they have in archaeology. Not long ago, when archaeologists were faced with the types of problems I have outlined in the previous chapter, their reaction would have been to ‘dig more sites’. More recently an alternative reaction has been to seek a total immersion in theory. We now realise that more data and theory do not necessarily bring more understanding and explanation by themselves. We need the link between these, new methodology. Tools other than picks and shovels are required. So, with apologies to Heaney: ‘Between my finger and my thumb the computer programme rests. I'll dig with it.’ Of course I am not implying that there isn't a need for new excavations. Just as poets need potatoes, simulation models need good archaeological data and both must continue to be dug from the ground.

The simulation model, which I see as a methodological tool, will follow the idealised encounter foraging system I proposed above. It can be divided into three components: a model for the hunting process, a model for the post-glacial environment and a model for decision making by the hunters.

In chapter 5 I have evaluated the current evidence for subsistence and intensification of production by third- and second-millennium be cultures in south-east Spain. In spite of differences of opinion as to the form and scale of such intensification, models have been proposed to account for its causes and consequences. Such models relate intensification to five other variables: system scale, technological innovation, complexity, interaction and integration. As we have seen in chapter 1, such variables have been argued to be of importance in the emergence of complex cultures in the Aegean Bronze Age and elsewhere. How important were such variables, and their interaction one with another, in south-east Spain?

In the course of the next four chapters, I will try to answer this question by evaluating five models of the causes and consequences of intensification in south-east Spain. In part, this evaluation process is concerned with theoretical arguments, which place emphasis on the form and scale of the variables under discussion. Equally important is the degree to which we can give meaning to these variables in the archaeological record. Models are of little use if they are theoretically acceptable, but empirically impotent. As indicated in chapter 1, we look to find predictions in the model as to the form, scale and relationship (causal? temporal?) between variables. Ultimately we have to recognise that no single model is right or wrong, but that theoretical and empirical arguments highlight their individual strengths and weaknesses, and their potential for future research.