as an archaeologist: to recover the past and to make it part of the consultable record of the human experience.
And much of that experience occurred at home.
CHAPTER 2
Starter Homes
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!
—John Howard Payne, Home, Sweet Home
With its thin melody that sounds saccharine to the modern ear, it is worth remembering that “Home, Sweet Home” is one of the most popular songs in all of American history. The song was born on the London stage in 1823, in a popular opera “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” written by John Howard Payne with music by Sir Henry Bishop (the first composer to be knighted, allegedly because Queen Victoria loved “Home, Sweet Home” so much).1 A native of New York, Payne had gone to London as an actor and gained modest standing as a playwright and librettist. His fortunes oscillated between outstanding success and crushing debts. Payne wrote the lyrics to “Home, Sweet Home” in a dull autumn in Paris, when “the depressing influences of the sky and air were in harmony with the feelings of solitude and sadness which oppressed his soul.”2
The opera was a modest success, but the song was a phenomenon. In the year of its debut, some one hundred thousand copies of sheet music for “Home, Sweet Home” sold, and it was tremendously popular throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the United States and particularly during the American Civil War.
“Home, Sweet Home” was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite songs, and it was cherished by both Union and Confederate soldiers. The images of home tugged at the hearts of even war-hardened troops, including those engaged in the December 1862 Battle of Stones River, a bloody clash in the vicinity of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The 44,000 Federalist soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland faced the 34,000 men in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. In miserable weather on the cold night of December 30, 1862, the two armies were within earshot of each other, stretched along the battlefront of stony outcrops and cedar brakes. As the short winter day ended, military bands on both sides began to play. A soldier in the First Tennessee Infantry later remembered that “the still winter night carried their strains to great distance. At every pause on our side, far away could be heard the military bands of the other.”
One of the bands began “Home, Sweet Home,” and as the well- known chorus echoed in the night air, Federal and Confederate bands on both sides of the battle line united in the refrain “one after another until all the bands of each army were playing ‘Home Sweet Home.’ And after our bands had ceased playing, we could hear the sweet refrain as it died away on the cool frosty air.”3
Over the next three days, the two armies suffered more than 23,515 casualties, with over 3,000 dead, one of the bloodiest engagements in the western campaigns of the Civil War.
John Howard Payne died further from home than any of the fallen at the Battle of Stones River. Approaching his fifties and after decades of travail to little effect—first as a composer and then as a low-level diplomat—Payne lobbied for the sinecure of a consulship. In and out of office with changing presidential administrations, in 1851 Payne was reappointed consul of Tunis and set sail that spring. Less than a year later, he died and was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery of St. George in Tunis.
But because of the popularity of “Home, Sweet Home,” Payne was not forgotten. The U.S. government placed a marble marker on his Tunisian grave, and twenty years later a bronze bust was erected in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, in a ceremony attended by thirty thousand onlookers.4 Ten years later, a group of Payne’s friends and former backers organized the return of the author’s remains from distant lands. In March 1883 Payne’s time-blackened bones arrived in New York, thirty years after his death. His remains were carried on a special train to Washington, D.C., where an elaborate funeral celebration, attended by President Chester Arthur and other dignitaries, was held in Oak Hill Cemetery on the occasion of what would have been Payne’s ninety-fifth birthday.5
Finally, John Howard Payne was home.
. . .
Exile and longing, wandering and return—for humans there is no place like home. These complex attachments originated among our distant hominid ancestors, millions of years in the past. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests,” Jesus observed before contrasting animal domesticity with his own wanderings. Astoundingly varied constructions are built by animals, and it is tempting to trace a connecting line from nests and dens to condos and tipis.
For all animals, including humans, constructions extend the bodily limits of existence. As the Nobel Laureate Karl von Frisch observed, “The most usual purpose of building activities in animals is to make a home that will give protection,”6 but animal constructions also serve as traps, pantries, stages for mating and display, climate control systems, nurseries, roadways, and so on. Animal constructions protect offspring, regulate moisture and humidity, ventilate gasses, communicate information, and camouflage occupants.7
Such constructions are sometimes considered examples of what Richard Dawkins has called “the extended phenotype,” the external manifestations of natural selection at the genetic level that extend beyond the organism. In Dawkins’s view, the creation of nests and dens, burrows and webs is driven by the essential genetic objectives: survival and reproduction.8
Such fundamental evolutionary drives have produced some astounding constructions. Termites can build towering nests 20 feet tall and excavate wells 150 feet deep, yet the animals are only one-tenth of an inch long; at a human scale these would be constructions 2½ miles tall and excavations 20 miles deep. Termite nests house several million inhabitants and are built by small individual insects laboring in the dark.9
Similarly, it is worth recalling that the largest construction on earth that is visible from outer space is not the Great Wall of China, as usually claimed (see chapter 7), but Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a 1,600-milelong structure made by organisms no longer than your fingernail.
Despite such awe-inspiring features of the natural world, not all animals build. As the biologist Mike Hansell has written, “The occurrence of building behaviors is neither confined to a narrow range of taxa nor scattered evenly through the animal kingdom. Instead, it has a few outbursts of virtuosity with talented displays of skill occurring sporadically across the animal spectrum.”10
The most stunning architects in the nonhuman world are spiders, mites, insects, and birds. Our closest animal relations—chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas—are uninspired builders. Nest-building by chimpanzees and bonobos is a fairly impromptu construction process.11 Both species settle nightly in trees, building nests of branches, sometimes with rough thatchings of leaves. As night falls, the apes groom each other, rest, and mate in their arboreal love-nests—behaviors in common with many modern humans. Unlike most of us, however, chimps do not eat in bed.
In field studies of chimpanzee and bonobo nesting behavior, one of the few patterns common to all the study-groups is that they avoid nesting in trees with ripe fruit. The height of nests varies based on environment: constructed 15–80 feet above the ground, nests tended to be higher in wetter environments or during the rainy season. Nests tend to be regularly spaced, but this may differ based on the threat of predators. Most nests are only occupied once, although in some study groups as many as one-third of the nests were reoccupied, but only when the a particular food source attracted the nomadic troop to linger in a particular locale.
