The Archaeology of Household Activities

Penelope Allison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134625482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This pioneering collection engages with recent research in different areas of the archaeological discipline to bring together case-studies of the household material culture from later prehistoric and classical periods. The book provides a comprehensive and accessible study for students into the material records of past households, aiding wider understanding of our own domestic development.

Chapter One
Introduction

Penelope M. Allison

Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a house is a heap of stones.

(Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis 1905)

The dwellings and dwelling spaces we inhabit house the attitudes and traditions through which we both conform to and confront the world beyond (Bourdieu’s habitus). That world has the potential to bring innovation into dwelling spaces but the dwelling spaces also provide the security through which we learn to negotiate acceptable relationships with these new ideas, and to formulate and test our own. The forms and patterns of dwellings (the architecture) can act as a medium through which the outside world (the wider community) can exercise control over the activities within. At the same time the physical structures provide the means to separate these activities from the direct influence of that wider society – a sanctuary from the perils outside’ (Ardener 1993: 11). For these reasons, architecture can never totally dictate the behaviour within its spaces. Its faades, and its internal divisions, serve as shields of social conformity behind which the traditions and the patterns of human interrelationships are formulated and enacted. Dwellings serve both to reveal and display’ and ‘to hide and protect’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995: 2).

The place of houses and households in the study of the past, and especially in archaeological approaches to the past, is significant. Households constitute the bulk of the population in ancient societies (Smith 1992a: 30). Concern for households in the past has traditionally been for their role as measurable socio-economic units of the wider community (e.g. Kramer 1980; Kolb 1985: esp 581; Blanton 1994). Such concerns have frequently been based in assumptions that a ‘mean family size’ can be calculated through average house size at a site (cf. Kolb 1985: 582) and, therefore, that the number of households, and hence total population, of an archaeological site can be measured. However:

We can describe the associations between material culture and social phenomena from which we estimate population but we have no model that can explain that relationship … The use of average figures for particular levels of socio-economic Organisation may prevent our recognising gradual change when we reconstruct communities which we have identified as moving from one level to another.

(Fletcher, comments in Kolb 1985: 592)

Wilk and Rathje (1982) stressed the importance of households as essential building blocks in the reconstruction of past societies. An understanding of the nature of change in household organization would bridge the existing ‘mid-level theory gap’ in archaeology (ibid.: 617). Households were seen as an essential level of inquiry in order to move ‘from grand theories of cultural change and evolution to the practical archaeology of potsherds and stone tools’. At the level of the household ‘social groups articulate directly with economic and ecological processes’ (ibid.: 618). Blanton has subsequently argued that households were probably the major arena in which social productive strategies are played out (1994: esp. 20).

However, beliefs that the actual compositions of households are known, and are relatively standardized and unchanging phenomena, have permeated such studies. Thus, studies of the internal dynamics and intrarelationships of a household have been viewed as trivial and insignificant pastimes in the investigation of the patterns of human behaviour. The mechanisms and ideologies which construct the household as a unit of reproduction to contribute to society’s production (see e.g. Gregory 1984: esp. 14) have been considered of little consequence. Beliefs in unproblematic compositions of households stem from perspectives that the head of the household Controls the activities and behaviours of his [wc] socio-economic unit. The contributions of the other members to its formation and to its interaction with the community are mitigated through that household head, and therefore largely irrelevant (see Hendon 1996: 46—8).

The deconstruction of such perspectives can only lead to an awareness that household dynamics are important factors in the social, political and economic roles of the household in the wider community, not as a unit but as a system of membership (see e.g. vom Bruck 1997). ‘[T]o understand the power of domestic space as a social construct, one must look beyond ritual action and grand cosmological belief systems and into the practical actions of daily life’ (Pader 1993: 114). To validate a conception of households as productive entities there needs to be a well-founded comprehension of what such entities might be composed of – the potential diversities of their internal organization (physical and ideological) both within a society and cross-culturally.

This book, therefore, concentrates on an essential level of inquiry — the Constitution and organization of households themselves. Only when the spatial, status, gender and age relationships in the organization and structure of households are more fully explored can the complexity and diversity of the roles of households, as social and productive units in the wider community, be better understood.

Ethnography

Without some structured perspective on the nature of households in the past they become an elusive concept. Archaeologists do not dig up households. They dig up dwellings and domestic artefacts but not social units (Wilk and Rathje 1982: 618). A household is an ethnographic phenomenon, not an archaeological one. Yet Wilk and Rathje’s definition (1982: 621) of a household as a centre for production, distribution, transmission and reproduction, draws on the ethnographic category (see Smith 1992a: 29) to construct approaches to the archaeological remains of past households. Wilk and Rathje (1982: 613) have argued that the embedding of household archaeology in a comparative ethnographic matrix is vital to any approach which will allow archaeologists to draw inferences about past household behaviour. And Blanton (1994) has attempted to develop methods for analysing the archaeological remains of households which are wholly dependent on ethnographic material.

However, the use of ethnographic and ethnohistorical analogy to explain archaeological phenomena can have the effect of normalizing past domestic behaviour and accentuating, or even constructing and superimposing, patterns of household behaviour from different temporal, cultural or spatial situations (see e.g. Fletcher, comments in Kolb 1985: 592. For the broader issue: Fletcher 1995: part I). As Ciolek-Torello argued (1984: 129), studies which have relied heavily on architectural parallels between historic and prehistoric puebloan rooms have ignored the potentially significant alteration of domestic activity space and organization since prehistoric times. Likewise, an archaeologists use of his/her own domestic behaviour as baseline ethnographic data stems from the philosophy that assumes the internal dynamics of a household are self-evident.

This is not to say that ethnography should be peripheral to the study of households in archaeology; rather, it is fundamental to it. However, the procedure should not be simply to use ethnographic data to describe household behaviour in the past but to use it also to highlight the potential for diversity and change in domestic worlds (see Wylie 1985: esp. 97-107). Ethnography should be employed as a signifier of complexity rather than a prescriber of household behaviour. Blanton’s work has stressed the importance of cross-cultural studies and comparative methodologies to deepen our understanding of archaeological assemblages (Nevett 1994). However, it has not actually dealt with the problem of using archaeological remains for the insights which they are capable of providing into households and household activities in the past which are not represented in the ethnographic record. He assumes that archaeology is only capable of following an agenda set by anthropology.

Text

Ethnography and ethnohistory are essential tools for exploring the possibilities for household composition and activities from the prehistoric past, but many studies of household archaeology have been concerned with the households of historical periods (e.g. Beaudry 1984; Gibb and King 1991; Wallace-Hadrill 1994). The availability of written documentation for the archaeology of the Classical, medieval, post-medieval and colonial worlds, and for much of the Near East, provides the researchers of these areas with an often very full body of data for the investigation of household behaviours and relationships (see Beaudry 1984). But the relationships between the textual and the archaeological material can be as complex and as difficult to grasp as the relationships between archaeology and ethnography, or the interrelationships of the members of households in the past. While, in many situations in post-medieval or colonial archaeology, at least some of the members of a specific archaeologically identified household may also be identified through documentary evidence (e.g. Karskens 1997: 156), attempts to relate archaeological remains to extant textual evidence must be sensitive to the ‘selective and unrepresentative nature of… texts’ (Hijmans 1996: 81). For example, textual material often emphasizes and reinforces the roles of society’s elites, while archaeology can frequently provide evidence of household behaviour across a much broader social Spectrum. This is not to say that the writers of texts are isolated from social structures (see Moreland 1992: 116). Rather, attempts to read the archaeological record through direct associations with documentary sources, without regard for the specific social and ethnic contexts of that archaeological record, for the specific agenda of the texts, or for the precise relationships between these sets of data, lead to a normalization of past domestic behaviour which denies it historicity, or its regional or status specificity. Such readings not only serve to perpetuate perspectives of the inconsequence of household dynamics in the writing of history, they also compromise the ability of archaeological data to provide information which cannot be directly associated with textual information.

Architecture

Not only are perspectives of household uniformity in the past derived from inappropriate associations of the archaeological record with often extraneous ethnographic or textual material, but studies which have concerned themselves with the archaeology of households have often been dominated by investigations of architectural remains to describe household behaviour. This is particularly evident in the predominance of studies which emphasize domestic architecture (e.g. Kent 1990; Blanton 1994). Investigations of the physical structures of dwellings from the past are frequently assumed to be investigations of domestic behaviour in the past (e.g. Laurence 1994; cf. Small 1996 and Tsakirgis 1996). Not only are houses physical units and not households (i.e. not social units). The investigation of structural remains may lead to an understanding of cultural patterning of space but does not, necessarily, lead to an understanding of the perceptions of those who built the buildings, still less to an understanding of the behaviour of those who inhabited them.

Rapoport has argued (1990: 15-20) that designers and users of the built environment are a far from homogeneous group and that ‘designers tend to react to environments in perceptual terms’ whereas ‘the users, react to environments in associational terms’. While some buildings are built by some of the subsequent occupants, users of buildings frequently inhabit spaces designed by the builders of an earlier period or by other, more dominant, social or cultural groups who may have imposed the structures on them. A belief that most will build the house in which they will dwell (Rippengal 1993: 93) essentially stems from a belief that the head of the household is the only important member of it. While cases may exist where all household members are involved in the construction of their dwelling, many household members live in dwellings which were constructed by close relatives or associates during their lifetime but into whose construction or into decisions about its form they had little or no input (see Blanton 1994: 8). Many others live in houses built by unrelated individuals or distant ancestors. It would, therefore, be truer to say that the vast majority of individuals will not build the house in which they will dwell. Even when members of the household have contributed to the building of their own dwelling, these members can often be more concerned outwardly to imitate other socially dominant groups, in the construction of their dwelling, than to conform to the expected lifestyle of the household members. In such situations ‘buildings [can act] as repressive mechanisms and authoritarian representations’ (Miller 1987: 164). However, while such dwellings can serve to constrain those lifestyles they can never completely reformulate them (see Pader 1993). To view architecture as a prescriber and dictator of household behaviour is to bias analysis towards the perspectives of the builder or the head of the household as the signifier of domestic behaviour and, once more, to undermine the significance of the activities of the other inhabitants in the structuring of dwellings as social spaces. Fletcher argues (1995) that there is no ‘proper’ relationship between architecture, meaning and the social behaviour of either its producers or its consumers (cf. Rapoport 1996: 416).

Another important point, when investigating households archaeologically, is that the term ‘architecture’ is frequently used to refer to floor plans alone, because these are generally all that remains of dwellings from the past. For this reason, investigations of the social arrangements of domestic space tend to see dwellings as a two-dimensional concepts. The application of Hillier and Hanson’s approach to social space (1984) to archaeological remains which are still three-dimensional (e.g. Grahame 1997) serves only to perpetuate a limited approach to the archaeology of households. Great emphasis has been placed on the layout of architectural remains at the expense of their three-dimensional proportions, windows, perspectives and decoration (e.g. Blanton 1994: esp. 24-37). For Roman archaeology, where such architectural remains are extant, Andrew Wallace-Hadrills study of Pompeian households (1994: esp. 3-61) can be seen as an important departure from this, interweaving more descriptive and art-historical approaches to extant architectural remains with historical material.

The archaeology of households is also not limited to the archaeology of individual structures. It has been adequately demonstrated (e.g. Fletcher 1977; Kent 1984) that household groups can inhabit more than one structure or, alternatively, that more than one household can inhabit one structure. This leads to considerable difficulty in the conception of a household in archaeological terms, particularly if structural remains are the only archaeological evidence employed in the analysis. Thus, it is important to break free from the idea of a household, in archaeological terms, as an architecturally dominated entity. But this is also important for the many cases in archaeology where the structural remains of dwellings are either not extant in the archaeological record or they never existed. That is, a household, as a social entity, is not bounded by the identification of its ‘house’.

Comments

It has been claimed that the investigation of households is an inappropriate inquiry for archaeology and that, because of its association with concepts of kinship, and a need for ethnography, ethnohistory and history to interprete spatial patterning, household archaeology is a misnomer (see Alexander, this volume). Some would argue that material remains cannot teil us anything about household behaviour. The problem here is not that archaeological remains cannot provide information on domestic behaviour in the past but rather that archaeological data is not always capable of answering the kinds of questions which anthropologists and social-historians might ask of their own data (see Wilson 1993: esp. 21).¹

Household archaeology which can use material remains to contribute to our knowledge of household behaviour in the past must set up questions which archaeological data is capable of answering and which will provide insights into human behaviour in past societies, rather than illustrations of textual or ethnographic information. Such insights may then be compared to such ethnographic, ethnohistorical or textual data for similar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Formation processes of house floor assemblages
• Chapter Three Household archaeology and cultural formation processes: Examples from the Cerén site, El Salvador
• Chapter Four Digging houses: Archaeologies of Classical and Hellenistic Greek domestic assemblages
• Chapter Five Labels for ladles: Interpreting the material culture of Roman households
• Chapter Six Mesoamerican house lots and archaeological site structure: Problems of inference in Yaxcaba, Yucatan, Mexico, 1750–1847
• Chapter Seven The appetites of households in early Roman Britain
• Chapter Eight Towards a feminist archaeology of households: Gender and household structure on the Australian goldfields
• Chapter Nine Spatial and behavioural negotiation in Classical Athenian city houses
• Chapter Ten The world their Household: Changing meanings of the domestic sphere in the nineteenth century
• Chapter Eleven Discussion: Comments from a classicist
• Index