ABSTRACT
In south-central Africa the problem of state formation has been interpreted from a number of clearly differentiated theoretical positions among historians, anthropologists and archaeologists which crosscut traditional disciplinary boundaries. Broadly speaking these may be divided into formalist approaches, which tend to concentrate on generalized patterns in the data, and substantivist approaches, which are concerned with the data in its specific material contexts (see Dalton 1981). Most recently, the development of historical and social relativist critiques (e.g. Hodder 1978a; Shanks & Tilley 1987), has caused the reappraisal of both cognitively oriented and materialist models in order to accommodate the situational variation in social processes that takes place at local and regional levels (Sinclair 1987).
