Our first two studies have explored the consequences of making the dichotomy between the literal and the metaphorical and the categories of myth and magic explicit. The argument has been that in each case, in origin, they played an important role in an ancient Greek polemic during which science and philosophy defined and legitimated themselves in contrast to the existing more traditional repositories of knowledge. Moreover the availability or otherwise of such explicit categories is one general criterion relevant to the analysis of differences within styles or modes of reasoning and argument. On the one hand there appears to be no justification, in these contexts at least, to talk either of divergent mentalities or of transformations in them. On the other the differences introduced by the use of explicit concepts of linguistic and other categories are reflected in important differences in styles of reasoning and of interpersonal exchange.

A further concept that offers a similar possible field of investigation is that of proof. The aim of the present chapter is to explore the evidence relating to the way in which that concept was first made explicit in ancient Greece, and the difference it made or the repercussions it had once it was available as an explicit concept. The practice of proof – in whatever area of thought – is of course far from confined to the Greeks, even among ancient civilisations: but the practice is one thing, having the explicit concept another.

The starting-point of our inquiry was the question of the validity and usefulness of the notion of mentalities and we may now attempt, in conclusion, to reassess that general issue in the light of the findings of our case-studies. As we saw at the outset, the notion of mentalities has been invoked in a variety of contexts, notably in social anthropology, in philosophy, in history and in psychology. The strength of the claims made in connection with the use of this notion has varied considerably. In some writers talk of a mentality seems to amount to little more than talk of certain recurrent attitudes, views or interests. At the same time some other appeals to the notion appear to have very sweeping implications indeed. This is true particularly when it is assumed that a whole culture, or a society at a particular period of time, or again each of a number of stages in universal human cognitive development, exhibits certain distinctive mental characteristics.

Evidently not all uses of mentalities are equivalent, and in particular it is not always clear just how far there is a commitment to those potentially sweeping implications. Again the ramifications of the appeal to mentalities in the methodological debates of historians, or in those of cognitive psychology, stretch well beyond the particular problems we have tackled here – as also do many other related issues to do with meaning and culture that have been aired in debates in linguistics, in philosophy and in social anthropology.

The general problem that this book addresses concerns the validity and usefulness of the notion of mentalities. This has often been used to characterise what is held to be distinctive about the thought processes or sets of beliefs of groups or of whole societies, in general or at particular periods of time, and again in describing the changes or transformations that such processes or sets of beliefs are considered to have undergone. In what circumstances, if any, is it helpful or at least legitimate to invoke the notion of a distinct mentality? How, without some such notion, can major differences not just in the content of specific ideas and beliefs, but between whole networks of them, be described and understood? Yet while the partisans of mentalities, influenced by a variety of arguments, hold that some such notion is indispensable, others have questioned its appropriateness or applicability or condemned its apparent extravagance. How the explananda themselves are to be described is as much in dispute as the explanations on offer.

The French sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl secured a wide diffusion for the notion of mentalities, in particular in connection with his ill-starred hypothesis of a prelogical mentality. This was supposed to be a feature of much primitive thought and one that helped to establish a contrast between it and the logical or scientific mentality to be found in advanced civilisations and especially in his own society.

If one of the original motivations for invoking the idea of differences in mentalities was somehow to account for what seemed highly counter-intuitive or paradoxical statements of the kind we have discussed in chapter 1, another was certainly provided by the problems in understanding magical practices and beliefs, often associated with ‘mystical’ or ‘mythical’ patterns of thought and so with the corresponding postulated mentality. Indeed some time before Lévy-Bruhl a certain preoccupation with the problem of magic is a recurrent feature in writers of different types. In some cases the strategic interest motivating the introduction of the topic is clear. Nineteenth-century evolutionists of different philosophical persuasions often invoked magic in developing the theme of the primitivism of archaic times. That theme, variously interpreted, was one shared by philosophers as otherwise divergent as Comte and Hegel. However it was Frazer who was responsible for a particularly clear and influential statement of the view according to which the three states through which human societies have developed are marked by magic, religion and science respectively (Frazer 1911–15).

Some of the reasons for the popularity of the Golden Bough have been analysed by Edmund Leach (1961, 1965, cf. Ackerman 1987). As a literary artefact it is highly polished, making liberal use of evocative epithets that reveal both a certain condescension and a certain romanticism. Frazer introduced his readers, at a safe distance, to the ‘wild man in the woods’, the ‘poor savage’ with his ‘vain fancies’.

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.