ABSTRACT
This chapter presents brief ethnography of residence patterns among bands of a hunting-gathering group, the Birhor living on the Chota Nagpur plateau of southern Bihar, India. It was hoped that from the ethnographic data certain descriptive generalizations might be advanced which would be of use to the archeologist in making inferences about prehistoric cultures. The possible generalizations entertained suffered, from the archeologist’s point of view, from the fact that their confirmation on archeological data alone would require greater control in the observation and measurement of cultural variables than is presently provided in archeological method. The problem is to see if people can detect cultural heterogeneity, suggesting the presence of more than one group in the sample, on the basis of archeologically observable nominal-scale variables. For cultural data, the method’s primary weakness will be found to be the necessary assumption of independence of the variables within social units, within tool traditions, or within any unit of postulated homogeneity.
