Approaches to understanding the individual in prehistory vary according to time and place and theoretical perspective. Structuralist approaches employ the individual to access the collective. Evolutionary approaches view the individual, rather than the group, as the primary locus of selections. In considering the individual, the relationship between individual people and aggregate data is critical and the role that grouping people together has in understanding the past affects the models that are developed. Many have examined the collective experience, but the individual scale is critical to the construction of the collective.
In the prehistoric past, archaeologists rely on various traceable aspects of human behavior. Choice of raw materials, functional differentiations, formal characteristics of tools, production techniques and intentional behavior, and food acquisition serve as focuses of archaeological research. The very question of whether the archaeological record can reveal individual events, and by extension, individual lives, deeply affects the extent to which the individual has been taken up within various subfields.
Is the archaeological record too coarse grained to record individual events? Some characterize the prehistoric archaeological record as snapshots of various points through time. The various timescales that are addressed across regions, continents, and millions of years provide an uneven record, at best. Some timescales permit ready accessibility to the individual scale of analysis, whereas others are judged to better serve a more aggregate perspective.
In general, archaeological research is conducted within research structures established by the paths developed by previous scholars, defined by sets of research questions that have been pursued for years. Within these established research paradigms, it has proven challenging for some scholars to address the concept of the individual, on account of the way that those structures are configured. Recent work in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic has made those structures and strictures plain, and has attempted to focus on individual lives in order to throw both the biased expectations and individual lives into relief. One of the many ways that archaeologists have addressed the individual in the archaeological record is to attempt to connect large-scale research questions with the idea of individual choice.
In prehistoric North America, a behavioral ecological approach to prehistoric mobile groups guides a substantial pool of research. Within the context of behavioral ecology, there has been a tendency to focus on the behavior of the group; nonetheless, there is general acknowledgement that individual variation affects the ways that ideas are transmitted. The role of inter - and intragroup variability is widely acknowledged to be critical in influencing culture, though some archaeologists have found the condition of the archaeological record an insurmountable obstacle to accessing this level of analysis. Yet, researchers engaged in examining the shift to foraging practices acknowledge the role of individual decisions in the arrival at significant cultural shifts.
World History
