ABSTRACT
Settlement models are primarily concerned with cultural norms, but they do not exclude everyday lives. A recursive relationship between the ethnography and contemporaneous archaeological data completes the process: for example, nineteenth-century Tswana ethnography compared with nineteenth-century Tswana settlements, or sixteenth-century Portuguese accounts of the Zimbabwe culture compared with sixteenth-century royal settlements. Recent debates surrounding the Central Cattle Pattern (CCP) and the Zimbabwe Pattern, however, show that anthropological models remain controversial for interpreting African prehistory in general and the Iron Age in particular. An international anthropological conference in Africa concluded that ethnicity should be restricted to groups of people in multicultural situations such as urban centres. In these multicultural situations, ethnicity involves the interplay between minorities and dominant groups within the same sociopolitical system. Moreover, the original spatial layout of K2 would have reflected eleventh-century social relations, but later, because of the fundamental sociopolitical changes, the layout was out of step, and the spatial pattern had to be adjusted.
