Household Archaeology

This study focuses on issues of culture contact and the materialization of identity through an archaeological case study of a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Cherokee community located in eastern Tennessee. The English Contact period (ca. A.D. 1670-1740) was an extremely turbulent time for southeastern Indian groups marked by disease, warfare, and population movements. I examine how this chaotic period played
out in the daily lives of Cherokee households. I use primary and secondary sources to develop an historical context for the English Contact period in the southeastern United
States. I introduce a reliable way to identify English Contact period Cherokee occupations using pottery and glass trade bead data. I also consult artifact data in order
to identify patterns associated with change and stability in the activities of daily life
within Cherokee households.

I find that daily life in Cherokee households changed dramatically as they coped with the shifting social, political, and economic currents of the English Contact period. Based on variability in household pottery assemblages, I argue that this particular
Cherokee community included households that migrated from geographically disparate Cherokee settlements. This type of social coalescence is documented among other Indian
groups as a strategy employed to ameliorate population loss resulting from European contact. I also find that the architecture and spatial organization of Cherokee communities changed dramatically during the English Contact period. Specifically, the
later communities lacked the highly structured spatial organization and long-lived residential areas that typified earlier Mississippian period communities. Ultimately, I argue that these changes too were strategic adaptations to the flexible and transient lifestyle required during the period.

Zwischen dem 3. und dem 5. Jh. n. Chr. veränderte sich das römische Imperium in vielerlei Hinsicht, die Gesellschaftsordnung blieb jedoch in ihrem Kern bestehen. Die Wohnkultur der Eliten jener Zeit gewährt Einsichten in das Verhältnis von Kontinuität und Transformation. Inwiefern wandelten sich die Wohnviertel der antiken Städte? Veränderten sich die Nutzungsgewohnheiten von Bewohnern und Gästen oder der Wohngeschmack der Hausherren? Am Beispiel mehrerer, besonders gut erhaltener Häuser in der römischen Hafenstadt Ostia werden diese und andere Fragen eingehend besprochen. Sie zeigen in besonderer Deutlichkeit, wie sich die Wohnkultur der römischen Oberschichten im Zusammenspiel von überregionalen und lokalen Entwicklungen, von Tradition und Innovation sukzessive veränderte.

The 'Past Sense' Project (PSP) brings together contemporary and historical archaeology, and psychotherapy, to consider the significance of material culture within contexts of domestic and sexual abuse, past and present. PSP will pilot a range of approaches to explore how collaborative community encounters with historic landscapes and buildings, artefacts, and other historical sources might enhance the process of identity (re-)construction and trauma management, for survivors of childhood and adulthood violence and abuse.
Methods include experimental auto- and co-archaeologies that integrate personal narratives and reflections within analyses of data obtained from archaeological surface- and building surveys, and auto-archive material. This will involve considering the (re)construction of meanings for material culture in relation to memory and identity, through studies of artefact biographies, and attending to the production and appropriation of transitional objects, through autobiographical studies.
We will also test the incorporation of recording, analysis, and interpretation of archaeological and other historical material (including written evidence, oral histories, photography, and artistic images) from earlier periods (particularly the 19th - mid 20th centuries) within community work – potentially involving creative elements (such as storytelling and artwork). In doing so, we will explore how engagement with material relating to domestic life in the more distant past (where appropriate, integrating historical material relating to domestic and sexual violence) might enable traumatised individuals and groups to confront experiences of violence in the more recent past. By examining diachronically continuous and changing abusive practices, and socio-political responses to abuse, we aim to foster recognition of dominant ideologies, and the practical, detrimental, effects of structural gender inequality. Emphasising acts of resistance to violence in and around the home, we endeavour to highlight personal and collective achievements that might reinforce and augment both a sense of self, and of community, for survivors of abuse.

This is my MA Thesis at WSU on the Ozette Baskets.  I attempted to do two parts of the scientific approach here, (1) observe and describe the 112 ancient Ozette baskets available at the time and (2) classify the basket attributes and types into explicit units of analysis for later use in the third part of the scientific approach (3)  explain and create hypotheses about these basket in comparisons to all other known Northwest Coast wet sites for my Ph.D. dissertation.  I also only do Ozette baskets in this study, and the Ph.D. dissertation also includes Ozette hats and mats.  To use the basket, hats, and mats classification and type designations, PLEASE USE THE 1977 and updated 2019 PH.D. DISSERTATION AS YOUR REFERENCE.  THIS MA HAD DIFFERENT TYPE NUMBER DESIGNATIONS, SO NOT CURRENT FOR COMPARATIVE WORK.

Here's how I describe this work in the original MA Thesis:

INTRODUCTION

The aims of this study are; first, to describe what has been found in the realm of baskets at the 0zette Site (45 CA 24), Cape Alava, Washing­ton; second, to establish a foundation for predicting what should be ex­pected in future excavations of baskets from this time period at 0zette; and third, to establish control of these data so that the 0zette baskets can be compared with both historic and prehistoric baskets in this area and elsewhere. This study will later be expanded to include the other forms of basketry--hats, mats, and cradles--and the cordage and knots at 0zette.

The baskets from 0zette were excavated from beneath a massive mudslide which, in prehistoric time (estimated to be about 500 years ago), covered a section of an occupied Indian village. The cultural material of this village closely resembles the historic materials of the Makah and Southern Nootkan groups. Almost all vegetal artifacts were preserved in a waterlogged environment under the mudslide. At present the area covered by the slide is being excavated and exposed from the seaward edge toward the center. The first longhouse encountered is nearly excavated. All the baskets in this house have not yet been recovered, but a large enough sample is available so that a basic study such as this can be accomplished. The collection of baskets used for this paper numbers 112 specimens [much higher for the 1977, 2019 Ph.D. dissertation]. The collection surely will be several times this size when excavations have been completed.

The universe for this study is from the first buried house exca­vated at Ozette (house B70 in the excavation series). This house is similar to the long shed roof structures of historic Makah, Nootka, and other coastal peoples. It is 66 feet long and about 36 feet wide, or approxi­mately 2,375 square feet in area. Baskets in the house were generally
found around the inside wall, along the bench-bed platform area where most of the household activities took place. Baskets found outside the house were generally broken, discarded ones. This analysis differs from previous studies of basketry in terms of the analytic techniques used. Nonetheless, the various attributes of baskets and the terminology used to describe them are standard and have been developed and used in studies of basketry over the past 70 years.

The nineteenth century was a time in which the Mashantucket and Eastern Pequots committed to their identity a new centrality of reservation lands. The period also saw their autonomy and sovereignty curtailed by a colonially imposed overseer system.  With the granting of reservation lands the colony of Connecticut also assigned each tribe with a white male caretaker with the paternalistic duty of managing their financial and subsistence wellbeing.  Through an analysis of their daily recordings this paper seeks to explore the extent to which the services of two such overseers were utilized by reservation occupants. 

The results of this research reveal two groups who shared similarities but also differed in their approach to subsistence and in their daily mitigations of reservation life.  Further analysis offers evidence for a critique of our ability as historians and archaeologists to essentialize either group into a cohesive “tribe” at all, as interfamily variation at both reservations seems to contradict patterns garnered from the communities at large.

This presentation is about the use of the imagination in the archaeological process, especially that part that takes off from the empirical anchor of fieldwork and laboratory research. It is part of an ongoing process in the construction of a recombinant history about Neolithic Anatolia and Southeast Europe that is based in the empirical details from the Neolithic villages of Çatalhöyük, Turkey and Opovo, Serbia  and is called Dead Women Do Tell Tales (DWdTT). It is an extraordinarily complex web of fragments about the archaeological construction of Neolithic households, from the records of the excavations themselves to interpretive vignettes from my creative imagination. This paper presents a radically new (for me) way of framing this web in the context of a computer game of the genre known as “serious game”. This phase of the project’s development shows how the narrative fragments are drawn out of the empirical entities of the Last House on the Hill (LHotH) database at the same time as giving them a more defined sense of place.

ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tdx.cat) i a través del Dipòsit Digital de la UB (diposit.ub.edu) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX ni al Dipòsit Digital de la UB. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX o al Dipòsit Digital de la UB (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. En la utilització o cita de parts de la tesi és obligat indicar el nom de la persona autora.

Este estudio analiza procesos contemporáneos de cambio cultural en dos áreas rurales del Noroeste de España. Ambas estuvieron habitadas por grupos sociales con una marcada identidad cultural que ha dejado su impronta en la cultura material: los vaqueiros d’alzada y los maragatos. Mediante una metodología arqueológica se analizan las casas de tres pueblos en cada caso de estudio, desvelando cómo la materialidad juega un papel fundamental en los procesos de cambio cultural. En líneas generales, se produce un tránsito entre las lógicas preindustriales de la domesticidad campesina y la concepción de la casa como un instrumento representacional que sirve para exhibir capital simbólico y social a personas de ámbitos urbanos con mentalidades individualizadas. El estudio muestra cómo la combinación de metodologías arqueológicas y etnográficas puede politizar contextos de cambio cultural contemporáneos aparentemente neutros.

Palabras claves: cambio cultural, cultura material, arqueología de los espacios domésticos, gestión del patrimonio.
This paper explores contemporary processes of cultural change in two rural areas of northwest Spain. These areas were inhabited by social groups with strong cultural identities that have made its mark in the material culture: the Vaqueiros d’Alzada and the Maragatos. The houses of three villages in each case study are analyzed through an archaeological methodology, revealing the key role materiality plays in processes of cultural change. Overall, there is a transition between preindustrial forms of peasant domesticity towards a conception of the house as a representational device used to display social and symbolic capital by highly individualized people from urban areas. The study shows how a combination of archaeological and ethnographic methodologies can politicize contemporary contexts of cultural change that are apparently neutral. Key words: Cultural change, material culture, household archaeology, cultural heritage management.

In this article the view is advocated that archaeologists should focus less on a three-dimensional reconstruction of architecture. Instead, we ought to think more about the reasons why buildings are shaped and organized the way they are. To achieve this, we should move beyond a mere functionalistic explanation, and incorporate behavioral studies and environment psychology, as suggested by Amos Rapoport. These reflections are taken into consideration in a case study of Greek Bronze Age house. The two-dimensional data of house plans are turned into reconstructions, but not only of the way in which people shaped their house. A reconstruction is also given of how people used their built environment to communicate and construct their identity. The data suggest that during Early Helladic III and the early Middle Helladic (ca. 2200-1800 B.C.) people identified primarily with their household but also with the community at large. Architectural changes towards the later Middle Helladic (ca. 1800-1700 B.C.) suggest that some households started to distance themselves from the collective identity. It seems they started to construct a new identity (possibly based on a larger social group), which led to competition between households.

In the late Bronze Age, small-sized, square or round shape houses emerged along with large-scale settlements involving the ditch-and-palisades, tombs, and agricultural areas. In addition, intensive agriculture and social differences appeared centering on large scale communities in several regions. Daepyeong was the centre of a two to three-tier settlement system in the Nam-Gyeongho-gang River Basin that was composed of six settlements.
In consideration of a number of archaeological contexts, Daepyeong society was underpinned by traditions of group-oriented society. Also, It is said that as production activities including manual industry were concentrated, the public rituals were used by elites as a strategy to gain authority and privileges. Variability in the size and kind of dry-fields is apparent in Daepyong. The irregularity and lack of uniformity in the Daepyeong dry-fields are more consistent with a model in which planning and implementation of intensive agriculture resulted from thousands of decisions of individual households. If we consider all the lines of evidence germane to intensive agriculture, bottom-up trends define the building, use, and maintenance of the dry-fields. Yet, some trends are more in line with top-down processes. Evidence that a managerial authority such as a chief controlled or planned or could have owned the fields and the harvested grains, most of the dry-fields in Daepyeong were not built close to the area where elite resided: the ditch-and-palisade area. A significant amount of storage capacity in the form of pits, large-capacity pottery, and raised-floor buildings is found in the ditch-and palisade area of Okbang.

Evidence from house structures, artifacts and fauna are used to infer political and economic changes at the Benson site, a late sixteenth century Huron village near Balsam Lake, Ontario. It  is suggested that one household acquired trade links to Europeans in the St. Lawrence valley, and as a result became the largest and most prestigious household in the community. Subsequently, a second household expanded to a comparable size, but did so in opposition to the first house, and represented the “traditionalist” faction.  Ultimately, the traditionalist faction prevailed, and the more progressive house was dismantled, and its inhabitants moved elsewhere.

Practically every culture distinguishes between clean and unclean things, actions, and people. This is true for simple hygiene as well as for ritual or
religious purity. While in most cultures both men and women can become polluted, impurity is more often associated with women, especially during menstruation. Consequently, restrictions on menstruating women were imposed in a vast number of societies—both ancient and modern—including ancient Israel, where the Bible regarded all bodily emissions as defi ling and women were regulated by the niddah laws.
Throughout history, various societies have developed different ways of separating the pure and the impure, usually by imposing restrictions on the movement and behavior of the impure. The question of impurity, therefore, has a spatial dimension, and rules governing impurity had to be formulated in relation to space. So how were women and their families expected to follow such restrictions within the specific conditions of their settlements and houses?
This paper analyses this question within the context of Iron Age Israel, and demonstrates how this society separated the pure and the impure within the domestic context.

This paper develops the theme of the feminist and post-processual critique of the processualist and traditional study of archaeological architecture. The article discusses the avenues through which a feminist exploration of archaeological architecture may proceed in practice, using data from Opovo and other sites in Southeast Europe.
https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/engendered-places-1994/

The Kyklades or Cycladic Islands have always been popular amongst archaeologists working on the Aegean Bronze Age and the 'glorious' Classical Greek past. In contrast, not much light has been shed upon aspects of post-Roman life on the islands. Research into the post-medieval period has been a subject mainly for historians and folklorists. This paper attempts to explore aspects of the lifestyle of the peoples who inhabited this island group throughout the more recent, yet most neglected centuries of Greek history, using archaeological, textual and other sources and methods. My aim is to reconstruct everyday rural life in Greece, by focusing on the domestic sphere and addressing questions concerning society and the domestic material culture of a littoral area that has remained traditional until very recently.
This paper examines some .first results of the CYRE.P. (Cyclades Research Project) and introduces examples concerning the domestic material culture of the late medieval and post-medieval periods (early 13th-late 19th centuries) in the Aegean Islands of the Cyclades, with particular reference to housing, furniture and internal.fittings, costumes and embroideries.

El Tolmo de Minateda (Hellín, Albacete) offers a stratigraphic sequence without interruption between the 7th and 9th centuries AD. In this paper, the explanatory potentiality of that sequence is discussed, mainly applied to the early medieval ceramics and architecture. We use this record as instruments of recognition of the cultural and social change. The analysis of both cases of study allows the material characterization of the 7th century and present interesting archaeological questions around the historical meaning of the 711.

Tolmo de Minateda, Stratigraphic sequence, 8th cent AD, pottery, Architecture, Social Change

Citation: Tringham, Ruth (2013) Destruction of Places by Fire: Domicide or Domithanasia. In Destruction: Archaeological, Philological, and Historical Perspectives, edited by J. Driessen, pp. 89-108. Presses Universitaires de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium.

In this paper I explore the reason why fire might be chosen as a means of destruction of places, be they urban or rural, public monuments or intimate domestic places. And how can and do archaeologists and historians act as arson investigators many centuries (and millennia) after the event to determine whether the destruction is an act of domicide or of domithanasia (accidental or intentional destruction). I started my exploration of fire and house-burning in the wattle-and-daub buildings of Neolithic Southeast Europe (5000 BC) (Tringham 2005). When I began working in the much older early ceramic Neolithic mud-brick buildings of Central Anatolia at Çatalhöyük (7000 BC), I assumed that the question of burning would not be a significant research question, as is demonstrated by the Berkeley Archaeologists@-Çatalhöyük (BACH) project (Tringham and Stevanović 2012). In this chapter, I will show how miscalculated that assumption was. I had forgotten James Mellaart’s Great Fire at the end of his Level VIA at Çatalhöyük (Mellaart 1964: 115-117). As it turns out the recent excavations at Çatalhöyük shed a great deal of light on the nature of destruction of houses by fire in prehistory, especially when considered alongside the data from Neolithic Southeast Europe.
https://www.ruthtringham.com/project/destruction-of-places-by-fire-2013/

Convegno internazionale sulla casa ellenistica e le loro funzioni. Tre giorni di discussione e presentazione dei risultati archeologici dei vari siti nel bacino del Mediterraneo. In questa occasione ho presentato alcuni risultati sull'architettura privata nelle regioni dell'Illiria meridionale e dell'Epiro, regioni poco conosciute da questo aspetto.

During the environmentally influenced demise of the Moche of Peru (A.D. 200-800), new archaeological and bioarchaeological data provide evidence that sites chose differential responses of resilience, including forging new political alliances, expanding economic production, and adopting new religious practices. Biodistance analysis shows that adjacent, highland Cajamarca peoples arrived in the Jequetepeque Valley and interbred with local inhabitants interred at San Jose de Mora during both the Late Moche (A.D. 650-800) and subsequent Transitional (A .D. 800-900) periods. Culturally, local ceramicists at San Jose de Moro reflected this influence by experimenting with hybrid vessels that blended local Moche forms and designs with highland ones. By contrast, recent excavations at the site of Talambo-located at the lower neck of the Jequetepeque Valley-indicate that the changes detected at San Jose de Mora and other sites in the valley were not uniform. Specifically, almost no evidence for adjacent highland influence was found at Talambo. Instead, investigation of independent craft production at Ta-lambo indicates that local artisans thrived during the transition from the Late Moche through Lambayeque (A .D. 800-1100) periods with minimal stylistic hybridization. We suggest that unlike changes noted elsewhere in the Jequetepeque Valley, the population at Talambo was able to moderate external influence and remain economically independent during a period of political and environmental instability.

Ceramics from Graham Connah’s research at Lake Innes, New South Wales, are compared with ceramics from the site of Willoughby Bean’s Parsonage, Gippsland, Victoria.  Previous analysis of the assemblages from five sites associated with servants at Lake Innes considered them in terms of evidence for social status.  Bean’s Parsonage provides an example of a middle class household that can be contrasted with the ‘heirarchy of servitude’ identified at Lake Innes, shedding further light on ways in which gentility is potentially manifested in archaeological evidence.  The size and variability of the ceramic assemblages has proven to be a far more reliable test of known status differences than comparisons of distributions of more expensive bone china and porcelain.  Gentility is reflected within the material culture assemblage as a whole and single measures such as the presence of more expensive wares are more effectively combined with other techniques such as the analysis of forms and the presence of sets

This chapter introduces the central themes in this volume and articulates those themes with previous
approaches. Neighborhoods in this volume are integrative socio-spatial groups between the household and the
settlement that are found in urbanizing landscapes. Previous theorizations of neighborhoods constrain them to
specific populations or forms of sociality. Our cases show that the fundamental aspects of these theorizations (intermediate,
distinct, cohesive, nested) can endure while population, morphology, and temporality vary. Neighborhood
studies are presented as complementary to household, community, and urban/peri-urban studies, while attention is
drawn to the diversity of forms neighborhoods take and diversity of themes neighborhoods help scholars address.
[Integration, Intermediate socio-spatial groups, Urbanism]

I made a rather intractable attempt to apply complex adaptive systems and agent-based modeling ideas to what we know about how ancient Egyptian civilization worked, a non-computational, metaphorical approach that suffered a bit from use of post 1820 AD basin irrigation works. But I still believe in the general principles, and the isomorphism between CAS and Max Weber's sociology as applied to ancient Egypt. After 18 years, Fractal House of Pharaoh needs revisiting.