BEHAVIORAL AND TAPHONOMIC PATTERNING AT KATANDA-9 - A MIDDLE STONE-AGE SITE, KIVU PROVINCE, ZAIRE

Katanda 9, an open air Middle Stone Age site, contains a dense vertica lly compressed accumulation of lithic and faunal remains. The physical state of these materials indicates prolonged surface exposure before burial and the site shares essential characteristics therefore with ma ny Lower and Middle Stone Age and Lower and Middle Palaeolithic occurr ences in Africa and Eurasia. An important goal of archaeological resea rch is to determine what, if any, anthropogenic signature can be extra cted from distributional data and this article utilizes Katanda 9 to s uggest an approach to such spatial analysis. It employs a bottom-up, t op-down strategy which works in sequential fashion first to determine and control for taphonomic bias and secondly to fit the resultant patt ern to models of hominid behaviour. It proposes that questions be pose d in nested hierarchical fashion and that probabilities of correctness be assessed. It concludes that the distribution of materials observed at Katanda is most consistent with a nuclear family pattern. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited