The potential of analogy in post‐processual archaeologies: a case study from Basimane ward, Serowe, Botswana

This article presents the results of an ethnoarchaeological study of Basimane ward in Serowe, Botswana. It is argued that African archaeology is currently at the forefront of the debate on theory‐building in ethnoarchaeology and that this debate is exemplified in the argument about the use of the Central Cattle Pattern (CCP) model as a direct historical analogy to Iron Age settlement in southern Africa. My case study demonstrates that the continuities of settlement architecture that are evident for the past century in Basimane ward should not be interpreted as the persistence of the cultural forms that are described in the CCP. Rather, the persistence of elements of the physical form of the CCP to post‐colonial settlement is a testimony to the interplay between structure and human agency, to the capacity of people constantly to re‐negotiate the rules – past and present, social and architectural – in order to make sense of the lives they live. The value of ethnoarchaeology to post‐processual archaeology is not to provide a contemporary ‘pattern’ of material culture that may be compared to an ancient one in the form of a uniformitarian analogy, but rather to demonstrate that, according to the discursive nature of Giddens's duality of structure, archaeologists would be wrong to disengage structure and agency in order to ‘find’ them as separate archaeologically identifiable components.