Social Behavior and Spetial Context

Abstract

This is a study of the Nchumuru, a Guang-speaking people who in prehistoric times came to inhabit large parts of Ghana and still maintain their traditional social system and subsistence practices. This paper examines how ethnographic data from the modern settlement of Wiae in the northern Volta Region of Ghana in West Africa, has been used to predict and explain spatial behavior within Nchumuru archaeological village sites. The balance of evidence coming from the archaeological surveys and excavations, suggests that the Nchumuru settled in family groups in the area of Volta Region in small villages each approximately four to five hectares. The house structures clustered into quarters each representing a clan (kabuno) and having an ancestral shrine located in the center of the house of the head. Compared to the house forms in modern Wiae, early Nchumuru houses did not possess the L- and U-shape configuration which defines a field of space that has an inward and outward orientation. This has been demonstrated to indicate that, since they settled in the area the spatial potential of the settlement was being invoked to make up for what the social resources of the group could not provide. Using a model termed the Local rule (L-R) model of spatial behavior, the paper explains that Nchumuru social system has been observed to operate at individual, clan (kabuno), and phratry (kasuro) levels. It is demonstrated that each of these levels of human social behavior follows spatial patterns that can be explained by an understanding of the opportunities offered by the social relationships (social resources) and the environment (natural resources). It is generalized that the organizational rules of the Nchumuru are not as rigid as those operative in the physical world, but they exhibit sufficient regularities to be recognized and described firstly as part of its major social group (the Guang) and then as Nchumuru, and also for explaining social and cultural continuities in the archaeology of their settlement history.