Household Archaeology: social history through excavations over the world

Household is a social term for a demographic unit which shares space and possession and performs activities at the common space. It may comprise of a nuclear family of one generation, an extended family, or a family with slaves and other ‘clients’. One central problem is that archaeology cannot recognize households . I t can identify dwelling units, but these do not necessarily correlate with households which could be, for example, larger or smaller . Even more so, domestic architecture reflects only part of household activities, excluding practices such as agricultural work in the fields, laundry in the nearby river, shopping in the next city’s supermarket, praying at the community’s temple, and so on. Another challenge of the discipline is to differentiate between phases in the household’s operation. This necessitates a relative chronology of the site, clear abandonment phases, and a good absolute dating – which are not as common as we would hope for. As we shall see in the course, scholars adopt a variety of methods in order to overcome these challenges and reconstruct some of the household activities, among them are pottery studies, the use of ethno-archaeology and models from sociology, or a comparison to historical sources. Most importantly, these studies focus on gender, family, slaves/children/elderly, and small-scale economy. After looking at some theory behind these approaches and the main methods scholars employ, we will go through case studies in different temporal and special contexts over the world.

General reading :

Allison, Penelope M. (ed.) , 1999. The Archaeology of Household Activities, London and New York: Routledge.

Barile , Kerri S. and Brandon , James C. , 2004. Household Chores and Household Choices: Theorizing the Domestic Sphere in Historical Archaeology , Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

Madella, Marco et al (eds.), 2013. The Archaeology of Households, Oxford: Oxbow Books .

Parker, Bradley J. and Foster, Catherine (eds.), 2013. New Perspectives on Household Archaeology, Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns .

Wilk, Richard R., and Rathje, William L., 1982. “Household Archaeology”, The American Behavioral Scientist 25(6): 617-639.