The Distribution of Material Culture Items in the Baringo District, Western Kenya

This article describes and discusses some distributions of material culture items in the Baringo district, W. Kenya. The aim of the work is to understand more about the factors which cause variation in the structure of artefact distributions in order to enable the archaeologist better to understand his data from the past. It is shown that many of the usual interpretations of material culture patterning are inadequate because they do not take into account the ability of groups and individuals to use artefacts as a medium for the communication of information about, for example, one's membership of identity groups and status groups. The importance of the symbolic nature of artefacts for the structuring of material culture distributions is shown at the boundaries between spatial identity groups, and in the distributions of maleand female-associated items.