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The shift from foraging to farming economies was deeply intertwined with increasing sedentism and the emergence of house-based corporate units in southwestern Asia, with a number of researchers arguing that in the early Neolithic, households become primary economic units within communities for the first time. In order to understand how this role for households articulated with new subsistence systems, this paper analyzes the knapped stone assemblage from the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B agricultural field house of al-Khayran in the west-central Jordanian Highlands. Results demonstrate that al-Khayran’s residential unit enacted household maintenance activities, intensive cereal production, bidirectional blade reduction, and caching of stone tools in anticipation of repeated temporary occupations at the site. These findings show that the corporate household which occupied al-Khayran enacted novel mobility practices in order to accommodate emergent risks in agricultural economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The village is usually viewed as a basic geographic and economic unit, characterized by unsophisticated social organization, limited interpersonal ties and weak external social networks. However, studies in rural archaeology and anthropology revealed that village life was more complex. This article offers a survey of several key theoretical issues relevant for interpreting archaeological remains of villages, farmsteads and estates/villas from a social perspective. It focuses mainly on the organization of the settlement as a holistic unit and the specific houses/households within it. The article seeks to explore the complex correlation between the spatial and social aspects of rural housing--the way in which the archaeological record attests to interpersonal contacts, their frequency and character. It demonstrates that the rural population was not merely a passive supplier of agricultural products to the neighboring towns and cities, but rather actively shaped its own culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some preliminary findings on the transformation and abandonment of domestic sites in and around Rome from the 1st to 7th centuries Common Era (CE). I utilize an innovative interactive map developed in Unity to showcase 46 sites in the study area, devising a methodology that draws upon the stratigraphic record of human activities in charting the trajectory of ancient houses over time. This contrasts with the standard approaches used over the last few decades, which have focused almost entirely on key moments of architectural and decorative remodelling, underemphasizing the constant and diachronic nature of change in domestic environments. My findings highlight the need to reassess conventional narratives surrounding the "end of the Roman house". Based on the data in this study, the Roman house emerges as more variable and less programmatic than often acknowledged, including in periods predating Late Antiquity. Future work is planned for presenting the full results of the research introduced in this paper, including those related to the application of game engines for mapping archaeological data from household excavations.

During the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000-350 BCE), the people of the Maya lowlands transitioned fromamobile horticulturalist to sedentary farming lifestyle, exemplified by permanent houses arranged around patios and rebuilt over generations. Early evidence of this change has been found in northern Belize, in the Belize Valley, and at Ceibal, Guatemala. At Cuello and other sites in northern Belize, mortuary rituals tied to ancestor veneration created inequality from the beginning of sedentary life. There, relatively dense populations facilitated the emergence of competitive sociopolitical strategies. However, Maya communities in different regions adopted different aspects of sedentism at different times and employed different power strategies. Unlike Cuello, Ceibal was founded as a ceremonial center by semi-mobile people. Middle Preclassic ritual practices at Ceibal and in the Belize Valley were associated with more collective leadership. At the end of this period, increased population densities contributed to a shift to more exclusionary rituals and political strategies throughout the lowlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is proposed that combining a microhistorical approach with the frameworks offered by household archaeology and posthumanism provides a way of rethinking what urbanity means in archaeological (specifically later medieval) contexts. This approach is deployed to challenge generalising approaches which obscure the complexity, vibrancy, and generative capacity of past urbanities. Focussing on the question of the fortunes of later medieval small towns in England, a posthuman household microhistory of two households in the town of Steyning (southern England) is presented. This demonstrates how a focus on the practices undertaken by, and relational constitution of, households can reveal difference and open new avenues for understanding past urbanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Middle Preclassic period (c. 1000–350 BCE), the people of the Maya lowlands transitioned from a mobile horticulturalist to sedentary farming lifestyle, exemplified by permanent houses arranged around patios and rebuilt over generations. Early evidence of this change has been found in northern Belize, in the Belize Valley, and at Ceibal, Guatemala. At Cuello and other sites in northern Belize, mortuary rituals tied to ancestor veneration created inequality from the beginning of sedentary life. There, relatively dense populations facilitated the emergence of competitive sociopolitical strategies. However, Maya communities in different regions adopted different aspects of sedentism at different times and employed different power strategies. Unlike Cuello, Ceibal was founded as a ceremonial center by semi-mobile people. Middle Preclassic ritual practices at Ceibal and in the Belize Valley were associated with more collective leadership. At the end of this period, increased population densities contributed to a shift to more exclusionary rituals and political strategies throughout the lowlands.

This article questions the cross-cultural ethnographic insight of metalworking as a male craft, commonly performed in male spaces (workshops) away from female members of society, through the analysis of archaeological evidence for the household-based metal production within multi-gendered and multi-generational households and corresponding but rare ethnographic examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From at least 1750 until 1900, Euro-American settlers of New York and New Jersey appropriated the production of Indigenous North American shell beads, namely wampum. Excavations at the David Campbell House in northeastern New Jersey yielded deposits of worked shell coterminous with household assemblages dating from 1810 to 1850. Artifact analyses combined with merchant ledger manuscripts reveal the chaîne opératoire of settler beadmaking from 1770 to 1900, including temporalities of production, waste, and racial and gendered labor dynamics in transition to factory production. Conclusions warrant greater archaeological attention to the relationship between capitalist industrialization, settler-colonial dispossession, and Indigenous resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing and defining behaviors is among the most challenging objectives of writing narratives about the past, especially when direct testimony and the evidence of agents’ actions are long lost. Typically, archaeologists look at material remains to reconstruct daily activities, while historians read and interpret documents that articulate how agents interacted with their surroundings. Following an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeology and history, the purpose of this paper is to reconstruct how different types of agents co-existed on board Portuguese ships in the Early Modern Age, and how those relations can be interpreted as a household. These ships sailed across different oceans with different purposes and destinations, carrying people, animals, and things, all of which had a level of agency. All these agents led to the development of specific relations and ways of being, characterizing the particular dynamics and associations during voyages.

Recognizing and defining behaviors is among the most challenging objectives of writing narratives about the past, especially when direct testimony and the evidence of agents' actions are long lost. Typically, archaeologists look at material remains to reconstruct daily activities, while historians read and interpret documents that articulate how agents interacted with their surroundings. Following an interdisciplinary approach combining archaeology and history, the purpose of this paper is to reconstruct how different types of agents co-existed on board Portuguese ships in the Early Modern Age, and how those relations can be interpreted as a household. These ships sailed across different oceans with different purposes and destinations, carrying people, animals, and things, all of which had a level of agency. All these agents led to the development of specific relations and ways of being, characterizing the particular dynamics and associations during voyages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Arqueologia is the property of Revista de Arqueologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The investigation of fires and burning within the archaeological record has a long history, and the applied methods are diverse. There have been several investigations of prehistoric archaeological sites, but Middle Bronze Age contexts (2000–1450 BC) of the Carpathian Basin have not been widely studied beyond studies of ritual burning or warfare. In this paper, we aimed to add further details to this topic in the household context via thin-section soil micromorphology and related phytolith and charred plant matter analysis. The combination of these techniques has been proven to be advantageous due to their high-resolution quality, but phytolith analysis of soil/sediment via thin sections (i.e., in fixed environment) has not been largely explored yet. In this study, these methods were used to investigate various burning events that affected a Middle Bronze Age Vatya house within the tell site of Százhalombatta-Földvár, Hungary. Three types of fire/burning events were investigated. One was related to hearth activity, another one to a presumed 'cleaning' of the house, and the last one to the termination of the building. In the first two cases, everyday life was under the microscope; the latter was more enigmatic, and probable intentional destruction was demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Subfloor pits serve as proxies for households and show the transformation from a small hamlet to a village community. • As the village grew the organization of various craft industries became more clearly spatially separated. • Village growth correlated with increasing involvement in long-distance trade, growing prestige, and wealth in people. • Rapid village reorganization reflects changes in the role of kinship, community membership, and conceptions of space. • Geophysical survey and excavation of subfloor pits allow analyses to work at multiple scales and levels of abstraction. The Machile River and its surrounding tributaries in Western Zambia formed a significant locus of Iron Age life in Zambia and served as a conduit for the localized movements of people, things, and ideas in south-central Africa over much of the last two millennia. Within this dynamic corridor, the early 2nd-millennium CE Kanono site represents a short-lived but well defined Middle/Late Iron Age farming community that integrated local crafting practices with global and regional orientations, during a period of dramatic political and economic changes across southern, central, and eastern Africa. Combining high-resolution geophysical survey and the results of targeted excavations at Kanono, we trace the emergence, growth, and abandonment of the village between the mid-thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries CE. We argue that changes seen in the village relate to the formation of a bounded co-residential community built around unilineal descent, which may have leveraged prestige in iron working into other forms of prestige – namely wealth in people and access to exotic goods. Approaching the archaeological record at Kanono from the perspective of household archaeology and daily life allows for an evocative 'peopling' of south-central African political economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Taliaferros were an African American family who lived in the post-emancipation neighborhood of Barry Farm/Hillsdale in southeast Washington, D.C. Their surviving daughter, Olivia, had a career as a nurse and midwife, but little else is currently known about her life. This article combines documentary sources, a salvage collection, and an archaeological collection to think about Olivia's career, her labor, and her social connections. I draw on household archaeology and Black-feminist thought to examine the possibilities of Olivia Taliaferro's lived experience, arguing that the material from her household has the potential to secure recognition of Black women's omnipresent contributions to the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El articulo discute sobre los arqueológicos domésticos de los guajolotes en Yucuita, Mixtecaalta y Oaxaca con el enfoque de los huevos de guajolote (Meleagris gallopavo) encontradas en un contexto doméstico en el sitio arqueológicos de La Loma, en Yucuita, Nochixtldn, Oaxaca, en la Mixteca.

Wari is thought by many to be the first Andean Empire (ca. 600–1000 AD); however, the means of expansion, the areas controlled, the strength of the polity, and the nature of Wari institutions remain largely contested. In general, models describing the Wari polity are simplistic and do not exploit sophisticated approaches developed by historical archaeologists. Wari expansion into the Moquegua Valley, Peru, was originally interpreted as an intrusive colony or distant outpost, perhaps to engage its southern neighbor, Tiwanaku. It was presumed that migrants from the polity's core established settlements and imperial infrastructure in an unoccupied ecozone. Recent research of households in the colony reveals diverse domestic material culture, diets, and use of living space. Those who lived in Wari-affiliated settlements were probably drawn from other imperial provinces and communities from other areas of the drainage. Forced relocations are common among historically documented empires, but willing pioneers may have selected for this tenuous frontier. Regional-scale data show that Wari had the strength to change the local economy and control this distant frontier province; household-scale data reveal the polyethnic nature of the colonial enclave and provide clues to understand early imperial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bjerre 7 is a modest Late Bronze Age house in Thy, Denmark. Excellent preservation and full-recovery techniques provided comprehensive evidence of farm self-sufficiency, local exchange, and amber collection for trade. Spatial analyses of ceramics, lithics, plant macrofossils, and amber identified distinctive activity areas at both ends of the house and outside. Routines are discussed for refuse disposal, ceramic use in everyday activities, ad hoc knapping and use of flint tools, plant processing, and amber storage. The household was economically generalized and largely self-sufficient, with limited specialization. Located close to the North Sea, the householders collected raw amber for trade. Metal was obtained from outside for a small-scale, household industry. Although some division of labour is likely, it seems that the whole household engaged in the diverse activities identified on site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of Iron Age (IA) societies through the analysis of architecture and built space. The approach is focused on a small area in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and constructs a small-scale narrative that seeks to identify different social dynamics concerning the onset, development and decline of the fortified habitat (between the ninth and first centuries bc). Three main spheres of human habitation are assessed: the environment of the household, the construction of collective and non-domestic buildings and the development of settlement planning. The main characteristics of these spheres are discussed and summarised, and they are understood as part of the same dynamic that reflects how the IA communities of northwest Iberia were structured. The main objective of the paper is to employ this methodology to study social dynamics at different scales and thus build a multi-scale historical and archaeological narrative about the development of heterogeneous processes in IA societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Island chains provide access to terrestrial, coastal and offshore marine resources, attracting peoples and cultures and serving as conduits for migrations and long-distance exchange networks. Situated between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, Rebun Island connected the prehistoric cultures of northeast Asia in a major "marine highway". Rebun was repeatedly settled by distinct cultures who originated in different geographic locations and left an imprint on the local ecology. To better understand how these cultures adapted to the local island ecosystems, lipid residues from household cooking containers were investigated across a 1000-year period at the Kafukai river mouth on Eastern Rebun, where a prominent Late Holocene settlement cluster is located. Our study suggests periodical shifts in pottery function, with the Susuya focussed on the processing of intermediate trophic-level aquatic resources, and Early Okhotsk specializing towards isotopically enriched marine products. In the Middle Okhotsk phase, both marine and terrestrial animal, and plant resources were exploited. These findings elucidate changing patterns of household consumption and the range of resources processed between cultural periods. We conclude that pottery lipid analysis can play an important role in island archaeology, clarifying shifting relationships between communities, exploitation of resources and the responses of new cultural traditions to new insular ecological niches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architectural remains, especially domestic architecture, are essential for understanding the ways in which households organized themselves socially and economically in the past. Unfortunately, these remains are infrequently identified from Woodland period (1000 BC-AD 1000) archaeological sites along the Gulf Coast, an area home to well-known ceramic and mortuary traditions during this time. As a result, our knowledge of Woodland period households in the region is scant. In this article I present a newly discovered house from Letchworth (8JE337), a large Woodland period ceremonial center in northwest Florida, and compare it to the few published examples of houses from this region. I show that domestic architecture along the Gulf Coast during the Woodland period is diverse, suggesting differences in the organization of households and the historical development of ceremonial centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period from c. AD 900 to AD 1300 in southern Africa is characterized by transitions from small-scale Iron Age mixed economy communities to the beginnings of more intensive food production and eventually the emergence of complex polities. In Zambia, this coincides with the appearance of larger and more permanent agro-pastoralist villages that began participating in Indian Ocean trade networks. Unlike other parts of southern Africa where stone architecture became common, the predominance of wattle-and-daub type construction methods across Zambia have often impeded preservation of Iron Age activity areas. It has therefore been difficult to reconstruct how economic and land-use changes between the Early and Later Iron Ages impacted family and community relationships reflected in intra-site and intra-household spatial organization. Fibobe II, in the Mulungushi River Basin of Central Zambia, is a rare example of an Early-to-Mid Iron Age village site where these spatial patterns may be discernable due to preservation of activity spaces and vitrified remains of wattle-and-daub structures. This paper reports on new investigations following original testing of the site in 1979, confirming preservation of an Iron Age hut with distinct patterning of features, artifacts, and charcoal. These results reaffirm the unique nature of Fibobe II and indicate the potential for programs of household archaeology aimed at studying this important and understudied period in Zambian prehistory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomena of colonial contact have been central to the history of research in protohistoric archaeology. The forms and results of these processes have been analysed through the material culture from tombs and large settlements, their defences, and iconographies, all of which are linked by snippets of written sources. This article deals with the problematic of the Balearic archipelago in the protohistoric period, when Punic Ibiza deployed an entire commercial policy as a spearhead for Carthage which absorbed a large part of the western Mediterranean. Meanwhile, in Majorca and Minorca, the autochthonous groups, foreseeably isolated from external influences, began to manifest a series of changes and transformations that are not understood within the traditional framework of the colonial debate. Therefore, these interactions are explored through the dialectics of everyday life, an approach that places the emphasis on individuals and domestic groups and their dwellings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zephyrus is the property of Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A wide range of rapid innovations are associated with the shift from mobile communities to sedentism in southwestern Asia. It was during this period that human societies generated many solutions designed to overcome the challenges of local environments, including the first long-lasting built environments, while adapting to life in year-round permanent settlements. The technological innovations that went hand in hand with these socio-economic changes improved the lives of the inhabitants of these communities, defining the period as a time of techno-cultural revolutions. Along with the domestication of plants and animals, houses became domestic spaces. Several characteristics of today's architectural technology originated during this period. The paper discusses one of the architectural innovations of the Neolithic period, "ventilation shafts," at one of the earliest settlements in central Anatolia, Aşıklı Höyük. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the economic system of the Classic Maya Lowlands secondary urban center of Uxul, Campeche. In particular, I aim to understand Uxul's economy by taking a household‐based approach, focusing on the distribution of artifacts and wealth in domestic contexts. I integrate a distributional approach with an analysis of wealth inequality using the Gini index, and insights from the field of modern economics into the mechanisms responsible for the observed economic patterns. This allows for the identification and characterization of market exchange in a case study where physical marketplaces have not yet been identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Summed probability distribution modelling of house and conflict data from the Columbia Plateau of North America. • Gini coefficient of modelling of grave goods as an indicator of wealth inequality. • Application of anarchist theory to ethnographic and archaeological data. • Ethnographic and archaeological records can be seen as complimentary accounts of historic processes. • Identifying future areas of inquiry that are needed within the Columbia Plateau. The Columbia-Fraser Plateau of Northwestern North America was inhabited by complex hunter-gatherer populations throughout the Late Holocene. Archaeological studies have typically characterized these peoples as having corporate households and wealth inequality. Ethnographic accounts emphasize the societies of this region as egalitarian communities and pacifist. In this paper we compare radiocarbon dates for semi-subterranean houses with legacy data for skeletal remains with trauma, mesa-top and island habitations, and storage caves to identify patterns in semi-sedentary settlement and conflict. Additionally, analysis of wealth inequality is conducted using legacy data of burials from throughout the Columbia Plateau. The radiocarbon dataset and legacy data can be reconciled with ethnographic patterns using an anarchist theoretical framework, to provide a potential explanation of the historical changes in socio-economic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new high-resolution excavation sequence of a house at the 1st millennium a.d. site of Unguja Ukuu, Zanzibar, with implications for a new and detailed understanding of the period between the 7th and 9th centuries a.d. on the East African coast. This is an important period associated with a broad and distinctive cultural tradition, often seen as a pre- or proto-urban phase. Household excavations at Unguja Ukuu revealed two occupation phases, spanning less than 40 years each. The results here thus present an unprecedented temporal resolution on the site, at the scale of human experience. Excavation and microstratigraphic analyses of multiple floor layers reveal decadal change in occupation at this house. Positioning this house into the broader settlement sequence, we argue for episodic settlement at the site of Unguja Ukuu and draw out detail on how we can explore change at this generational scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La idea de lo que es y caracteriza la Arqueología de la Arquitectura puede variar sensiblemente de unos países a otros en función de sus respectivas tradiciones historiográficas. Está por hacer un estudio de conjunto de los diversos enfoques y metodologías sobre las construcciones y los entornos construidos, una realidad material que contiene múltiples dimensiones y que puede ser observada desde las más variadas escalas, temporales, espaciales y conceptuales. Con esta breve aportación se quiere ofrecer una primera síntesis de este complicado rompecabezas, pensando sobre todo en quienes quieren introducirse en la materia. Se reivindica una Arqueología de la Arquitectura abierta, plural, responsable y comprometida.

This paper presents a case study of an African/Indian Ocean plantation located in Mauritius, focusing on the daily lives of indentured labourers during the nineteenth century. Bras d'Eau National Park was a sugar estate that functioned from 1786 to 1868. During the 1830s, colonial landowners shifted from a reliance on enslaved labourers, who came primarily from Mozambique and Madagascar, to indentured labourers primarily originating in South Asia. Four hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children travelled to Mauritius to live and work on sugar estates. Household excavations were conducted in the detached houses and line barracks that make up the plantation domestic quarter. Domestic artefacts from these village spaces, such as South Asian smoking pipes, glass bangle fragments, buttons from second-hand British military uniforms, cowrie shells, rice bowls and traces of a diet based on pulses-and-rice suggest a persistence in South Asian cultural practices while also demonstrating a creative engagement with material culture from across the region. Grounded in comparative plantation archaeology, this study of the landscape and material culture at Bras d'Eau represents one of the first full investigations of nineteenth-century indentured men, women and children's daily practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, company towns often provided housing for workers within a system of benevolent paternalism. This paper examines a set of workers' cottages known as "the Twelve Apostles" on Maria Island, Tasmania. The archaeology reveals differences between the standardized, company-built houses, providing evidence that the residents' responses often varied in ways that were not officially expected or sanctioned by the company. People individualized their houses in ways that reflect their everyday routines and rituals, and demonstrate how they made these houses into homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]