alt="image"/>μω) to build or construct. Distinct from the domos, the household was the oikos, a meaning retained in “economy” (the study of the law, nomos, of the household, oikos). The process of building a home for a household was oikodomein, a term that united those distinct meanings into a single process.
One could pursue such etymological strands further, but there would come a point for which we have no written records that hint at domestic variations. Beyond the border of literacy, only archaeology illuminates the deep human experience of home.
. . .
In general, the public receives a distorted vision of what archaeology is and what archaeologists do. Television documentaries breathlessly describe the hidden riches of long-lost tombs, the moldering glories of ancient temples. With astounding luck, major discoveries are made during the three days the film crew is on site—and this happens week after week! An archaeologist directs a major excavation in the humid tropics of Guatemala, yet appears on camera in a clean shirt free of sweat stains. Archaeological research projects are presented as yet another spin-off of Survivor.
An admission is in order: I am profoundly susceptible to the romance of archaeology. I fell in love with archaeology as an eighteen-year-old, and I am still passionate about it decades later. I own copies of every Indiana Jones movie. I married an archaeologist, my best friends are archaeologists, and when I go on vacation I tend to visit archaeological sites. And I watch the documentaries just like everybody else.
But the “treasure and temple” emphasis does not really reflect what archaeologists generally do. For all the dazzle and excitement of gilded discoveries, most archaeologists actually engage in an intellectual project that is substantially more profound: “What does it mean to be human?”
Mentally traversing a path of inferential steps that would surprise Sherlock Holmes, archaeologists connect the material traces of the past to reconstruct the nature of the human experience. In his classic book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, the historical archaeologist James Deetz argued that even in literate societies with written histories, archaeology uncovers aspects of human life that are so fundamental and quotidian that no one bothered to record them.
As the adage “history is written by the victors” implies, the historical record often overlooks the lives and voices of the powerless, the subjugated, or the ignored—in short, the majority of human beings. Written history unevenly illuminates human experience. The earliest written records from Mesopotamia are cuneiform tablets dating to 2800 B.C. that principally record economic transactions and administrative matters. The oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs date to 2920–2680 B.C., texts that proclaimed the pharaohs’ authority and implemented his will. The written record from Asia dates to circa 1300–1000 B.C. and comes from Shang China; it is a historical record that, not surprisingly, highlights Shang accomplishments over those of rival kingdoms.
Contemporary with the developments in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Harrapan civilization employed the Indus script by circa 2800–2600 B.C., although scholars cannot read it nor are they certain what language family it relates to (Indo-European vs. Dravidian).
In the Aegean, hieroglyphic writing was used by circa 2000 B.C.; it remains undeciphered. The equally unreadable Linear A script was employed around 1700 B.C., while Linear B was used by Mycenaean Greeks at 1450–1000 B.C., at which point the Aegean devolved into a nonliterate Dark Age that lasted until 750 B.C.
Turning to the Americas, the recently discovered Cascajal Block is associated with the Olmec culture of Veracruz and dates to 900 B.C., thus making it the earliest known Mesoamerican writing system, followed by Zapotec (ca. 600 B.C.), the phonic system associated with Mixteca-Puebla, and Teotihuacan, Mayan, and Aztec writing systems.9
These are the regions in the world with the longest literary traditions, yet the written record covers a small fraction of these areas’ histories. A few temporal reference points illustrate this.
Detailed historical materials for Ancient Greece exist for the Archaic and Classical Eras of circa 750–400 B.C., yet archaeological sites containing stone choppers and scrapers that date to 400,000 to 200,000 years ago have been found in gravel deposits in the Thessaly region, Lower Paleolithic artifacts probably associated with Neanderthals. Subsequent sites associated with modern humans in the region date to 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. In the prefecture of Argolis, southwest of Athens, Franchthi Cave has a remarkable occupation that spans from at least 20,000 to 3000 B.C., the longest archaeological sequence currently known from Greece.10 This means that approximately 98% of Greek history falls outside of the written record.
The archaeological record from China extends back to Homo erectus, and the famous site of Zhoukodian (the place where “Peking Man” was discovered) has archaeological layers dating from 670,000–400,000 years ago.11 Between 99.1% and 99.5% of Chinese history occurred before the first Shang scribe picked up a paintbrush.
And so it goes. Australia has been occupied for at least 50,000 years; its written history begins in the late seventeenth century A.D. Humans occupied South America by some 14,000 to 12,000 years ago; the written record covers less than the last 600 years. New Guinea was occupied 40,000 years ago; its written history begins in the 1930s.
Most of human experience has slipped through the lines of texts. Archaeology is the only way those ancient lives can be recovered and added to the consultable record of what it means to be human.
The human past is a vast and fascinating domain. Archaeology is more than the pursuit of temples and tombs.
Archaeology is a way to learn who we are.
. . .
Home is central to the human experience, and the following chapters explore the antiquity and diversity of human domestic life. In this, the range of The Prehistory of Home is broader than Witold Rybczynski’s wonderful 1985 book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, with its emphasis on comfort and dwelling in the Western European tradition, or the engaging sprawl of Bill Bryson’s 2010 At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which focuses on the United Kingdom and the United States. Neither is this a complete compendium of prehistoric structures, which would require an encyclopedic coverage similar to the magnificent, three-volume 1997 Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture edited by Paul Oliver.
My objective is simultaneously broader and more circumscribed. The goal of this book is to survey the ways that small, forgotten things from the past illuminate the varieties of the domestic experience. The Prehistory of Home explores how the broad archaeological goal of understanding the past intersects with the continuing human domestic project.12
Although integral to human experience, our hominid ancestors did not always make dwellings, and the archaeological evidence for the earliest domesticities is the subject of chapter 2, “Starter Homes.” Since the times of ancient Greece, architects and philosophers have proposed what Rykwert calls “fabulized prehistories,” imaginary reconstructions about the evolution of homes like those put forth by the Roman architect Vitruvius or centuries later by Enlightenment philosophers. The archaeological evidence suggests a developmental path that was more complex and divergent, as two of our ancestral species—Homo ergaster and Homo erectus—emerged from Africa to explore and settle Europe and Asia. These early hominid pioneers were replaced by us, Homo sapiens, who left Africa in a second great wave of migration approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, colonizing the areas occupied by earlier hominids, but also moving into previously unoccupied regions of Australia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
The
