Introduction
Family is a fundamental aspect of humanity, which we define broadly here as a social community based around care, cooperation, and shared resources. This may include not only multigenerational or nuclear families bonded by marital or biological ties, but also single-parent or adoptive families, platonic co-parenting, alloparent networks, “families of choice”, residential religious communities, and even long-term institutional residents (Krawiec, 2003; Neimetz, 2011; Gazso and McDaniel, 2015; Golombok, 2015; Nelson, 2020). Such a view of family allows us to discard a spurious domestic-public dichotomy and to explore the multifaceted roles of family members within and outside of the home. Archaeological interest in the issues and concerns of the “domestic” past has historically been low, with a focus on male-oriented economic and technological pursuits being prioritised (Spencer-Wood, 1999). Consequently, the study of women's and children's lives was once consigned to the margins of archaeological research, causing these groups to appear at worst invisible, and at best, as a supporting cast defined only by their relationships to men. In recent decades, this trend has reversed, putting women and children at centre stage. Interest in the archaeologies and anthropologies of gender and childhood is at a zenith in the 21st century (Baxter, 2008; Geller, 2009). While this recognition of the agency of women and children is both welcome and long overdue, it is important to understand their lived experiences and choices within the context of their interpersonal relationships and social resource networks. A focus on familial units and the interconnectedness of their members is therefore intrinsic to understanding not only mothers and children, but all members of past societies.
Whilst families are a universal feature of societies, definitions of family vary widely over time and space, and form the focus of heated debates in many Western cultures. Reform of divorce laws, the women's rights movement and greater participation by women in the paid workforce, migration, mass incarceration, developments in reproductive technologies, and marriage equality legislation have all produced seismic changes to family structure in recent decades (Mechoulan, 2006; Rome, 2010; Moore and Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, 2013; Turney, 2014). In the late 19th century, sociologist Emile Durkheim stated that “the family of today is not more or less perfect than that of old: it is different, because the circumstances are different. It is more complex, because the environment in which it exists is more complex: that is all” (Durkheim 1888, cited in Kuper, 1985: 230). However, Durkheimian functionalism, and the ideological neutrality expressed therein, is at odds with prevailing modern views. Family structures are subject to value judgements, as they are often used to allocate legal protections and responsibilities associated with taxation, immigration status, healthcare and unemployment benefits, and parental rights (Turner and West, 2015). In consequence, progressive social campaigners have argued that invalidation of familial status is heavily involved in the reproduction of existing societal inequalities (Henretta et al., 2012; Ollen and Goldberg, 2016). Conversely, conservative thinkers have contended for the importance of clearly defined familial structures, as the private sphere of the family is threatened by expansion of the public welfare state, and usurpation of traditional familial functions (West, 1984; Daatland and Lowenstein, 2005).
Controversies over recognition of familial fluidity go beyond the concerns of structural power and governmentality, as changing families are perceived by some as representing a crisis of public morality. American political “family values” rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, was preceded by, and may, in some respects, be regarded as a backlash to social changes associated with the civil rights movement and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, changes to marital law, reproductive rights, and increases in women's education and paid employment were associated with rising divorce rates and drops in overall birthrates in many Western nations during the later 20th century (McClamroch, 1996; Brinig and Allen, 2000). Marriage itself appears to have declined in popularity during recent decades (Taylor, 2010). Moral panic regarding the “breakdown” of the family, which peaked in the 1990s, has not diminished in the 21st century, as disquiet over the implications of women's changing roles within the family has been augmented by perceived challenges to the “traditional” heteronormative, nuclear family. Widespread legalisation of LGBTQ+ marriage equality in the West, along with female-headed or single-parent households, delayed marriage or long-term cohabitation, and voluntary childlessness have all been construed as existential threats to the integrity of the traditional family by social conservatives (Moore, 1994; Giles et al., 2009; Pizmony-Levy and Ponce, 2013).
The past, whether real or imagined, has powerful symbolic value in the present, as it provides the justification of precedence and tradition as a metric of value. The family of bygone days represents a particularly valuable ideological asset, as nostalgia for a Westernised, nuclear ideal is used to legitimise prejudicial attitudes and policies of the present (Dowson, 2000). Thus, where they occur, culture wars (at their most reductive) exist between progressives, who look to a future utopia for inspiration, and conservatives, who model their values on those of the imagined past. Familial nostalgia can also be used to solidify a sense of in-group solidarity, and police hierarchies within groups. The Nazis notoriously used archaeology to invoke an idealised patriarchal German ‘lost family’ and justify eugenic and genocidal agendas (Arnold, 2006: 25). Re-emerging right-wing American and European ethnonationalism in the 21st century has similarly leveraged demographic angst and fear of minoritisation to re-assert patriarchal gender norms, and reverse slowed population growth among whites (Perry, 2004; Bonds, 2020). Associated white nationalist movements, such as the anti-feminist “Tradwife” internet phenomenon, seek to define femininity through its function within the family—especially through connection with a nostalgic Stepfordian ideal of domesticity (Mattheis, 2017; Campion, 2020). Disciplines whose province is the substance of the past, such as history or archaeology, have a powerful and ideologically non-neutral role to play in the construction and problematisation of historical narratives and imagery (e.g. Conway, this volume; Kendall and Kendall, this volume). In consequence, scholars have an opportunity and a moral responsibility to challenge ethnocentric and ahistorical assumptions, such as the universally “traditional” nature of the nuclear family, through evidence for the complexity and variety of human familial forms over time and space.
Why should archaeologists study families in the past?
The ideological power of families in the construction of a romanticised past has been remarked upon above. In terms of the responsibility of disciplines that contribute to narratives of past societies, the importance of contributing social commentary that offers context and nuance to wider society is clear: while we need neither devalue nor be beholden to the traditions of the past, retrospectives can be useful for understanding the source of dynamics in the present. Furthermore, in a more esoteric sense, comprehension of past familial structures and dynamics is foundational to understanding other social relationships and networks in past societies within historically oriented disciplines. While the importance of familial social networks has long been a central theme in history or anthropology, within our own discipline of archaeology, there have been longstanding tendencies either to ignore the influential role of family in society, or to conflate familial ties with households or biological kinship. Likewise, the indirect impacts of familial structure are rarely explored. Nonetheless, grappling with familial paradigms that transcend the biological, heteronormative and nuclear is a challenge that faces archaeology—and bioarchaeology in particular. We advocate a reflexive approach here to studying past families, one which embraces both variety in form and a biosocial model for relatedness.
Families have not historically received their due attention within archaeology. The predominance of an androcentric archaeology in the early and middle 20th century marginalised women and children, and thus associated domestic relationships, at that time (Kamp, 2001; Conkey, 2003). However, from the 1980s feminist archaeology established the intrinsic importance of women's participation and activities (e.g. Conkey and Spector, 1984; Engelstad, 1991; Gero and Conkey, 1991), followed by the development of childhood archaeology later in that decade (e.g. Lillehammer, 1989; Crawford, 1999; Baxter, 2008). Interest in the domestic also increased in the 1980s, as archaeologies of the household sought to identify patterns of activity and consumption located within the home (e.g. Wilk and Rathje, 1982; Smith, 1987; Stanish, 1989), and this continues to be a fruitful area of scholarship (e.g. Pluckhahn, 2010; Madella et al., 2013; Kahn, 2016; Crawford, Salmon, and Ulmschneider, this volume). Nevertheless, households are not synonymous with family. While families may, and usually do, share a household, this is not universally the case, as families may span multiple households or be dispersed across significant distances (see Burton, this volume). Furthermore, social boundaries between households and the larger community may be blurred (e.g. Birch, this volume). Nevett (2011) has suggested that the bias of archaeologists in favour of the household as a unit of study may be a simple reflection of their analytical targets, and an inability to “see” ephemeral soci...
