the portaledge allows climbers a sheltered night’s rest as they dangle hundreds of feet in the air, humans use dwellings to extend their reach even for just a night or a few days. And we have done so for more than seven hundred thousand years.
. . .
FIGURE 3. J. Middendorf, The Portaledge, circa 1990. Drawing courtesy of John Middendorf.
The most influential American archaeologist of his generation, Lewis Binford (1931–2011) spent decades carefully examining ethnographic accounts of traditional cultures and searching for patterns in human behavior that would be discernible in the archaeological record. Explicitly committed to the scientific search for law-like generalizations, Bin-ford compiled massive data sets based on literally hundreds of case studies about historic and modern hunting and gathering societies. While those hunting and gathering societies are not static representatives of earlier Paleolithic people, the case studies suggested some basic patterns relevant to thinking about the past. Although Binford’s studies ranged over different aspects of the lives of hunters and gatherers, one analysis explored the question: Why do hunters and gatherers build such different kinds of homes?2
One of the first conclusions from Binford’s study is simultaneously surprising and obvious: All hunters and gatherers build shelters, even at camps they occupy for a single night. This would be an uninteresting conclusion, were it not for the long-standing, Western assumptions about the rootless, au naturel existence of hunters and gatherers.
As the eighteenth-century thinker Giambattista Vico succinctly observed, “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.”3 In Vico’s reconstruction, the earliest wild and sylvan stage occurred in the aftermath of the Great Flood, “when the impious races of the three children of Noah, having lapsed into a state of bestiality, went wandering like wild beasts until they were scattered and dispersed through the great forest of the earth.”4
Similar musings form a recurrent theme in Western thought about human origins. During the first century B.C., the Roman architect Vitruvius considered the origins of the earliest buildings in his classic Ten Books of Architecture. Humans came together, Vitruvius proposed, when attracted by the unusual warmth of lightening-struck trees. Since they were bipedal,
having from nature this boon beyond other animals, that they should walk, not with the head down, but upright, and should look upon the magnificence of the world and of the stars.
They also easily handled with their hands and fingers whatever they wished. Hence after thus meeting together, they began, some to make shelters of leaves, some to dig caves under the hills, some to make of mud and wattles places for shelter, imitating the nests of swallows and their methods of building. Then observing the houses of others and adding to their ideas new things from day to day, they produced better kinds of huts.5
The homelessness of savage nations is a theme touched on by different writers, not surprisingly by Enlightenment authors discussing the origins of architecture. In his 1791 “A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture,” the British Neoclassical architect Sir William Chambers imagined a Paleolithic idyll, in which “every grove afforded shade from the rays of the sun, and shelter from the dews of the night” and our ancient forebears “fed upon the spontaneous productions of the soil, and lived without care, as without labor.”6
Chambers’s model of human origins combined an Enlightenment version of selective pressures with a Stone Age precursor of Hedonism II. The seductive tropical climate inevitably led to procreation, and as population increased, competition intensified for scarce resources. Consequently, Chambers opined, “separation became necessary; and colonies dispersed to different regions: where frequent rain, storms and piercing cold, forced the inhabitants to seek for better shelter than trees.” The tropical emigrants “at first… most likely retired to caverns… but soon disgusted with the damp and darkness of these habitations, they began to search after more wholesome and comfortable dwellings.”
FIGURE 4. “The First Building.” After Viollet-le-Druc.
Binford’s analysis is a relief after these florid musings. He argued that the shelters hunters and gatherers build—and remember, they all build shelters—reflect, in part, their broader adaptations to physical environments, whether they live in the equatorial tropics or arctic tundra. First, hunters and gatherers vary in their mobility. Fully nomadic groups move camps throughout the year, while seminomadic hunters often construct a substantial dwelling each winter, but spread out to seasonal camps when the weather is less severe. Semisedentary hunters and gatherers construct residences that they regularly reoccupy, although venturing out from those hubs and constructing temporary shelters before returning home. Sedentary hunters occupy dwellings year-round, although hunting parties or foraging groups may journey out to find key resources and bring them back home.
TABLE 1 MOBILITY AND HOUSE PLAN IN HUNTING AND GATHERING SOCIETIES
Second, mobility shapes the form and construction of hunter-gatherer houses. More nomadic groups build circular or semicircular dwellings. More sedentary groups build rectangular houses. More nomadic groups either transport the building materials—for example, the canvas and poles of a tent—or they build their homes from immediately available materials. More sedentary hunters and gatherers will transport construction materials to the house site, often building the roof and walls of different materials, which more mobile hunters and gatherers do not. Seminomadic and semisedentary groups often have different types of dwellings lived in during different seasons or by different groups of people, while the most mobile and the most sedentary groups tend to occupy only one kind of dwelling, whether impermanent or enduring.
Third, such variations are shaped by the specific demands of subsistence. When a people’s diet is based on hunted game, they tend to move more frequently, occupying circular or semicircular dwellings built from locally available or transported materials—especially if they have dogs, horses, or caribou that can carry tents and poles. When a people’s diet is based on fish, mollusks, or marine mammals, they tend to be less mobile, living in more permanent and substantial dwellings.
Binford’s insights imply that the earliest forms of mobile homes reflect the calculations of survival. We have to consider the dwelling within a complex framework of other decisions—about food-getting and movement—that hunter-gatherers make in order to survive. Rather than the blind clawings away from beastliness as the Enlightenment thinkers had suggested, such little rustic huts reflect a rationality that those savants would have prized.
. . .
On the Pacific Coast of Baja California, powerful waves chisel away at the coastal terrace. The coastal terrace consists of uplifted marine sediments, ancient shorelines raised as the Earth’s tectonic plates groaned and buckled. The soils are an unconsolidated jumble of wave-rolled cobbles, clays, and silts. In deep, ancient times when glaciers melted and sea levels rose, the Pacific Ocean cut a long escarpment that runs for 150 kilometers, still visible 130,000 years later. A handful of brief rivers and numerous small arroyos cut through the coastal terrace in search of the sea.
Arroyo Hondo forms a large and (as the name suggests) deep drainage that slices a convoluted landscape whose names portray the difficulties of travel by Catholic missionaries and Mexican soldiers. Almost two hundred years after sea voyagers claimed the Californias for Spain, the colonization of Baja California was a slow and painful process in a landscape of agony.
