the topic of chapter 3, “Mobile Homes.” Humans occupied a diverse array of environments, in part because dwellings were elements of their cultural toolkit. The dwellings of hunters and gatherers reflect their nomadism, whether it occurred 20,000 years on the periglacial steppes of Palaeolithic Ukraine or over the last 6,000 years in Baja California in the desert between the seas.
The development of more sedentary life is discussed in chapter 4, “Durable Goods.” While today most people live in relatively permanent houses, the process towards sedentism occurred rather late in human prehistory. In the Near East, archaeological sites dating between 18,000 and 8,000 B.C. mark waypoints on the path to settled life, when dwellings became more substantial and rooted as humans relied more on intensively collected foods and ultimately made the transition towards agriculture. Parallel trajectories are discernible in archaeological sites around the world. In Japan, for example, the abundant resources of forest and sea allowed Jomon cultures to build substantial dwellings 8000 years before wet-rice agriculture became the basis of economy, but after gathered foods had to be stored and large objects were necessary to process them. The connection between sedentism and our possessions is not new, although the problems of having “too much stuff” are faced by modern human societies around the globe, particularly in the United States. And finally, the connections between dwellings and identity are transformed when our possessions include the reliquiae of our dead kin.
Our homes are more than simple shelters or storage sheds. We imbue our dwellings with complex meanings, and our houses serve as metaphoric templates of the cosmos, a broad set of topics discussed in chapter 5, “Model Homes.” Houses become architectonic models for diverse and fundamental meanings about cosmic order and social distinctions. Whether we think about the creation of male vs. female spaces in a Navaho hogan or the implications of the term “master bedroom” in an American suburban house, humans use their dwellings as models. The symbolic analogies between house and cosmos are derived from earlier human efforts to give symbolic concepts material form, a process that began at least 70,000 years ago. However, the domestic expressions of cosmologies only occurred after the dwelling became a recurrent experience for social groups—either when nomads erected the same tents in different places or when sedentary households lived in the same dwelling for extended periods. At that point the symbolic associations of home become breathtakingly complex.
Bees live in hives, prairie dogs in colonies, and humans in apartment buildings. The origins and implications of densely settled group life are explored in chapter 6, “Apartment Living.” In eastern Anatolia, the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was a dense warren of tightly packed buildings holding residences and shrines between ca 7300–6000 B.C. Examples of multifamily dwellings consist of Banderkeramik long houses of temperate Europe (5300–4900 B.C.), Native American plank houses in the Pacific Northwest (A.D. 200/500–1950), and Iroquois longhouses (A.D. 1350–1800). In the American Southwest, similarly dense constructions include the “Great Houses” at Chaco Canyon (A.D. 900–1150), the cliff houses of the Colorado Plateau (A.D. 1150–1300), the Classic Period Hohokam complex at Casa Grande (A.D. 1150–1350), or Zuni Pueblo (A.D. 1500–present). In each of these cases, apartment life posed problems of density and dissent.
At various times and for a variety of reasons, humans have lived behind walls, the topic explored in chapter 7, “Gated Communities.” Although walled cities first emerged in ancient Mesopotamia amidst a landscape of conflict, humans build walls for different reasons: to defend, to define, to hide, or to separate. Though the medieval walled city and the Benedictine monastery were both walled communities, those similar architectural constructions referenced different social realities. In ancient Persia and on the North Coast of Peru, kings lived behind the tall walls of royal compounds to hide their humanity from their subjects. Walls are built to separate genders, and the archaeology of Christian convents and the architecture of Swahili houses are similarly designed to ensure the chaste purity of women. Not only a common domestic practice in the ancient world, today gated communities are the fastest growing human settlement form, a global phenomenon known as the “New Enclavism.”
The domestic and the political realms can intersect in our dwellings, a topic explored in chapter 8, “Noble Houses.” Noble houses frequently combine multiple functions—they are seats of authority, warehouses and treasuries, arenas for political display and religious rituals—such as at the House of Tiles (2500–2000 B.C.), located on the Greek mainland, or in elaborate palace complexes of Knossos and other Minoan palace polities (2200–1450 B.C.) of Crete. This intersection of roles occurs among small-scale societies living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, among Nootka living in British Columbia in large plank houses in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the fifteenth-century Palace of Chilimassa on the far north coast of Peru. In all of these cases, politics, hospitality, and ritual intersected at home.
Just as dwellings may encode cosmological symbols, the structures may themselves be transformed into “Sacred Houses” (chapter 9). The Tabernacle was the “House of the Lord,” a tented dwelling built for Yah- weh by a migratory pastoral society. In many cultures, past and present, domestic altars are one terminus of an axis between house and temple, functioning “variously as satellite, extension and miniaturization of the local temple.”13 In other cultures, the sacred may literally be incorporated into the walls of a dwelling as rituals surround the collection of construction materials, building, and completion of a house. Alternatively, supernatural beings may be invited into the home (at least to visit), transforming the house by their presence.
It may seem an ironic contradiction, but one way to preserve a home is to burn it. In chapter 10, I discuss the different manners and cultural logics reflected in “Home Fires.” The houses of Pompeii and of Cerén, El Salvador, were preserved in ashes. Across a broad swath of southeastern Europe, houses were consistently burned during the Neolithic, apparently not by raiders or accidents but by their own inhabitants, even though this required stacking kindling and firewood within the structure. This did not mean the end of the house, but its regeneration, and new dwellings were built on or nearby the house’s charred remains. Analogous practices in distant archaeological sites—including historic Cherokee villages in the southeastern United States—demonstrate that preservation and remembrance do not require permanent constructions.
Our homes encompass and demarcate our lives, and dwellings may provide analogous shelters for souls in the afterlife. Chapter 11, “Going Home,” examines the cultural creation of parallel domesticities in lives after death. The astounding mortuary complexes constructed in the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt were predicated on earlier funerary architecture in which a subterranean home was created and equipped for life after death. In Neolithic Europe, long houses metamorphosed into long barrows, becoming commemorative constructions that anchored identity. In a broad array of human societies, the ancestors dwell in villages of the dead. Similarly diverse conceptions of the relationship between death and home characterize American society in different points in our history, as our ideas have changed about the corpse and the soul, the graveyard and the home
A final note: each of these chapters contains a brief description from my own archaeological investigations into the prehistory of home. Whether excavating an Archaic house in far northern Peru, investigating an impermanent campsite in Baja California, or documenting the labyrinthine patterns of royal Chimú palaces, I am fascinated by the archaeology of home. Thus, my specific investigations intersect with the broader themes that run through this book, and those broader themes recursively inform the way I approach my specific investigations. As the
