ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the means by which ethnoarchaeology can help to address archaeological problems about settlement. It is not disputed that ethnoarchaeology has been a useful subdiscipline of archaeology for the past few decades, and recent changes in the questions being asked of prehistoric settlement (many of which are outlined in papers in this volume) have made the potential contribution of ethnoarchaeological research ever more important. Here, I use the results of my own ethnoarchaeological fieldwork among the Bamangwato and Basarwa (San) of Botswana to discuss some of this potential. For the purposes of this paper I define settlement as the entire repertoire of domestic and political architecture because, as will be shown, these so-called ‘categories’ of structures work together as a symbolic whole for the Basarwa and the Bamangwato, and any one category would make less sense if studied as an isolated ‘type’.
