house reflected multiple decision domains.
And every house always does.
Thus, the first factor that makes understanding human dwellings so interesting and challenging is that they are the material expressions of intersecting considerations. Our homes provide shelter and they express our identities. Dwellings enclose social groups of various sizes, from single individuals to entire religious communities. Houses vary in size, permanence, symbolic valence, functions, and so on, reflecting the varieties of the domestic experience.
And the second challenge to understanding home is this: We have been building homes longer than we have been Homo sapiens.
. . .
For the last thirty years, I have been digging into people’s homes. Working in the dry desert coast of Peru, I have excavated ancient houses built from river canes in A.D. 1400–1500 and uncovered a large work camp built circa A.D. 1350. I studied a small eighteenth-century native Chumash hut in Southern California built during the cultural penumbra between initial contact with Europeans and the full onslaught of Spanish colonialism. As a member of my wife’s archaeological project in southern Mexico, I excavated the remnants of pole and thatch houses from the Colonial period and studied architecturally similar modern pole and thatch houses to understand the dynamics of construction and decay in the hot tropics. In Baja California, I have mapped open-air encampments and rock shelters of hunters and gatherers who occupied the peninsula from 4500 B.C. to A.D. 1800. In my recent expeditions in far northern Peru, I have excavated small elliptical pole and thatch houses that date to 4700–4300 B.C., large structures that probably housed extended families at 3500–3100 B.C., rectangular houses built from wattle and daub after 900–500 B.C., and the remnants of tabique houses occupied when the Inca Empire expanded into the region after A.D. 1470.
Although all my archaeological fieldwork has been in the Americas—Southern California, Baja California, southern Mexico, and Peru—these projects explored various prehistoric and historic cultures, occupying distinct environments, organized as diverse societies, and pursuing different livelihoods. The common element among them is that home was central to all these divergent lives.
I am endlessly intrigued by the prehistory of home. The creativity invested in dwellings is astounding. But beyond this, I must confess to a somewhat personal and what some might see as a less-than-scholarly interest in the prehistory of home: I deeply love my home.
My family and I live in a modest house in Long Beach, California. Long Beach is notable among Southern California beach communities for its lack of pretension. It is known as “Iowa by the Sea,” in part because of the large number of Midwesterners who settled here in the decades flanking World War II, but also because of its lack of flash. It is a comfortable but unprepossessing community.
The main part of our house was built in 1913; we are the fourth family to live in it. The wall studs are century-old redwood, the window glass has settled with age, and the oak floors have the patina of good sherry. This original part of the house was small, only 900 square feet, and after five years of living in very close quarters, my wife, my son, and I added a new wing to the house in 1999, but one that maintained the architectural lines and building materials used in 1913. While we wanted to be a little more comfortable, we wanted to do so in an unobtrusive way—much like the city where we live.
Beyond this, though, our house anchors our lives. It is where our son has grown from toddler to man. It is where we have hosted a score of Thanksgiving dinners and dozens of parties. It is where we write books, prepare lectures, read, and think. It is where we have been at our best and at our worst. It is our home.
I am acutely aware that my experience of home differs from that of ancient people living in different cultures in other dwellings, but a line of empathy threads through my archaeological inquiries into the prehistory of home. I look at a curve of cobblestones that mark the edge of a five thousand year old house in Tumbes, and I want to know about the families who lived under its thatched roof. If I come across an ancient campsite in Baja California, I strain to hear its occupants’ voices, now muted by time. If I am excavating the faint traces of an ancient hut, I am acutely aware that for someone at sometime this too was home.
. . .
Multiple meanings reside in “home.” In modern English usage, the term may refer to the place where one lives, the house or dwelling one lives in, the family or residence group living in a dwelling or place, one’s country or birthplace, a person’s or animal’s typical range or habitat, the place where something was invented or created (“Atlanta, Georgia—the home of Coca-Cola”), a place of ease distinct from one’s normal dwelling (“a home away from home,”) a sense of familiarity (“at home with”), a sense of recognition or responsibility (as in “this brought home the consequences”) or finally an orphanage, asylum, or retirement community that takes the place of “home.”5
The etymology of the English “home” untangles some of its strands of meaning.6 Home, from the Old English hām, has cognates in other Germanic languages: the Old Saxon heām, Old High German heima, and the Old Scandinavian heimr. In turn these words are probably derived from the proto-Germanic *χaim which comes from the Lithuanian kie¯mas and káima. These older versions of home imply distinct meanings and concepts. The Old English ha¯m refers to a collection of dwellings or village (a “homestead”), while the Old High German and Old Scandinavian words couple the notion of a residence with the idea of “the world.” The earlier Lithuanian terms connote a village or farm as opposed to a town, and link back to the Sanskrit ksêmas, which denotes a safe or secure dwelling, abode, or refuge.
These Gothic notions of home are rooted in the expansion of Neolithic societies into temperate Europe beginning at circa 5500–5300 B.C. Reliant on crops (wheat, barley, peas, and flax) and livestock (predominantly cattle, but also sheep and pigs) first domesticated in the Near East, these agriculturalists had colonized mainland Europe and the British Isles by 3800 B.C. The initial farming communities of temperate Europe were small clusters of households, not towns or cities. As late as A.D. 98 the Roman urbanite and historian Tacitus wrote:
That none of the several people in Germany live together in cities, is abundantly known; nay, that amongst them none of their dwellings are suffered to be contiguous. They inhabit apart and distinct, just as a fountain, or a field, or a wood happened to invite them to settle. They raise their villages in opposite rows, but not in our manner with the houses joined one to another. Every man has a vacant space quite round his own, whether for security against accidents from fire, or that they want the art of building.7
The original English “home” refers not only to a house—and explicitly not to an urban existence—but to a small cluster of buildings hacked from a temperate forest, a constructed oasis that defined one’s world. Due to this prehistoric agrarian legacy, the meanings embedded in the English word and its Germanic cognates are distinct from those in other Indo-European languages.
As Joseph Rykwert has noted, ancient Romans distinguished between overlapping concepts of constructed domesticity.8 Domus referred to the house as household, a sense combining architectural and social units. In contrast, Romans used aedus to refer to the constructed building and mansio for a place of rest and comfort. A humble rural hut—as different from a country estate or villa—was a casa and was applied to the Gauls of Iberia, which led to the Spanish word for house and was transformed into the rustic informality implied by the French chez moi.
The Greek domos (δ
