Approaching the Household

So what is it, exactly, that we are purporting to investigate? The modern English word household evokes a rather daunting array of meanings and connotations.¹⁸ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “household” can mean “a group of people (esp. a family) living together as a unit”; a “domestic establishment”; or even “the contents or appurtenances of a house considered collectively; household goods or furniture.”¹⁹ In other words, depending on context, “household” can evoke everything from people, to institutions, to places and structures, to things themselves: the physical “stuff” of domestic life. Nor are we on much firmer ground with “house,” even if that term might initially seem to offer a reassuring solidity.²⁰ Architectural definitions of the “house” are challenging, because not all dwelling sites involve formal architecture,²¹ and even when they do, there is not always a one-to-one relationship between a structure and a dwelling; some homes consist of massive multibuilding estates, while others are single apartments or rented rooms within buildings that are mostly occupied by other people.²²

One of the most influential efforts to create operational definitions of “household” (and assorted related concepts) is that of the historian Peter Laslett. For Laslett and those who follow him, a household is about both people and place: it consists of individuals who both share a residence and act together as a meaningful socioeconomic unit.²³ These individuals may consist of a single family (that is, people who are genealogically related through kinship, however kinship may be defined in their society),²⁴ but this is not always the case. Besides family members, a household can also include dependents, such as enslaved laborers or live-in servants. In this volume, Dorothy Thompson (chapter 4) discusses a Ptolemaic-period demotic Egyptian property contract that refers to two types of servants (bꜢk.w, šms.w) as well as enslaved people (ḫl.w) as potential members of households. Laslett further distinguishes between household and houseful, which is a more comprehensive term for people who share a residence: whereas the members of a household are socially united in some capacity as members of a shared economic and legal unit, a houseful could also incorporate more distantly connected individuals, such as lodgers.²⁵

We frequently read that the “household” is a socioeconomic entity, whereas the “house” is a physical entity. Yet if that is the case, the relationship between these two very different sorts of things is by no means straightforward. As Bruce Routledge puts it in a review of several recent publications on household archaeology:

On reading these books in succession, I was immediately struck by the impression that (1) most scholars begin from the assumption that the household is a fundamental social group; (2) most scholars accept that this group bears some significant relationship to houses as built structures encountered in the archaeological record; and (3) no one presents a clear and coherent argument to explain this relationship; indeed, a number of authors seem to hold rather different views. So, from the beginning, we have a problem with the link between archaeological houses and households.²⁶

And Routledge is not wrong to identify a serious issue here. Let’s say we dig up a structure that we identify as a “house.” If we assume an a priori one-to-one correspondence between this structure and the activities of a single social group that we call a “household,” we risk eliding both the predepositional and postdepositional history of the structure. By the time we encounter the physical remains of houses in the archaeological record, they may have been inhabited by not just one household, but a whole series of households over generations.²⁷ Additionally, their current condition has been shaped not just by their ancient inhabitants, but by all manner of subsequent formation processes.²⁸ In this volume, Anna Boozer highlights the reuse of abandoned houses as garbage dumps (chapter 8).

Most recently, the “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences has prodded some scholars to problematize the apparent Cartesian dualism of “household” (as social construct) versus “house” (as actual, physical thing). As Julia Hendon expresses the situation:

[A] certain unease has pervaded household archaeology, precisely because of the assumption that the true focus of interest is a social institution which must be an abstraction or an idea in people’s heads, not a material form. Thus, houses become a stand-in that must always be qualified as less than ideal.²⁹

Yet is the household really just an abstraction, a ghost in the house’s machine?³⁰ If “household” refers, as per Laslett, to a group of people who live and work together in intimate proximity, then the household is not so much an abstraction as it is a set of relations. It describes the relationships between real people, whose bodies were just as material as anything else in the house, and whose interactions with each other would have been enacted through, and even constructed by, domestic material culture.³¹ In other words, the household is a tiny network, whose participants—if we follow actor-network theory or a range of other “new materialist” approaches—could indeed be said to include objects as well as people.³² Ultimately, the supposed dichotomy between the household and the house is a red herring. Instead of imagining the house as separate from the household, we may do better to conceive of it as a member of the household.

In which case: just as the human members of a household vary widely in their identities and personalities, so too do the material forms that share (and constitute) their living space. And in many cases, that living space may not confine itself neatly within the bounds of a single built architectural structure. As Lynn Rainville asks:

Is domestic limited to the archaeologically discovered “home” or “house”? If so, would a communal bread oven (visited by neighbors each morning) constitute a “domestic activity area” or is the domestic space only the locale where family members consume the bread? On the other hand, would a local market where shoppers collect ingredients for baking the daily bread (or other meals) be considered part of a domestic activity area? … . [Are] the sherds recovered from a men’s teahouse part of a domestic assemblage? … To pose the question another way, do people have to sleep in a structure for it to be domestic? And, if so, are inns, caravanserai, hotels, and so forth considered domestic residences? Or does sleeping have to co-occur with other domestic activities such as eating, child rearing, and bathing? With [sic] the co-occurrence of these two activities, a cemetery could be defined as domestic because it provides eternal rest.³³

To rephrase Rainville’s series of questions: of all the various activities that we associate with “dwelling,” which ones are the most essential, why, and to whom? Here we also need to consider the possibility of differences between emic and etic conceptions of “house” and “home.” Ancient people’s understanding of what made a place into a home, or what made a group of people into a family or household, may often have been different from our own. To this end, the chapters in this volume address a wide range of perspectives on the relationships that connect and separate the English “household,” Egyptian per, Greek oikos, and Coptic ma nshōpe.

In fact, let’s go back to Rainville’s comment about cemeteries as possible domestic spaces. In context, this statement appears to be intended as a rhetorical flourish—a sort of mic drop to prove her point about blurry definitions. Yet there are in fact societies where people speak of tombs as the houses of the ancestors³⁴ or preserve the bodies of the dead within the houses of the living,³⁵ and there are places, like the “City of the Dead” in modern Cairo, where living people repurpose tombs as dwellings.³⁶ The necropolis and the polis are not always categorically separate.

More broadly, many of the activities that take place in houses also take place in other residential or quasi-residential settings. Take, for example, inns, taverns, and brothels, all of which Glazebrook and Tsakirgis call “places of temporary habitation and dining.”³⁷ Such sites are indeed “places of temporary habitation” from the perspective of their customers, but they may well be permanent habitations for the people working there. In the ancient Mediterranean, the proprietors of many small businesses—inns, shops, restaurants, bars, and other places—lived on the premises with their families.³⁸

Brothels too were often long-term residences for the individuals who worked there,³⁹ raising the prospect of a household that is not centered on a family. Discussing one apparent brothel in Building Z of the Athenian Kerameikos, Bradley Ault proposes that the women who lived here should be considered “homeless,” because even though they had a roof over their head, they did not have the sort of domestic community that Greeks would have understood as an oikos.⁴⁰ Yet the Greek oikos, or household, was (much like the English word) not defined in terms of kinship relations alone.⁴¹ The people who lived and worked in this building may have remained there for a long time, and it is hard to imagine that they did not form any meaningful interpersonal relationships among themselves. Can we be certain that they did not understand themselves to constitute a sort of oikos?⁴² We have ancient texts that inform us about how some Classical-period Greeks thought about the oikos, but these are almost entirely written by elite men,⁴³ whose perspectives might be very different from those of the women in Building Z.⁴⁴ When we ask how ancient people conceptualized “house,” “home,” and “family,” it is important to consider differences between emic and etic perceptions—but we can also go farther. Rather than searching for one single homogeneous emic view, we should recall that many different opinions, worldviews, and perceptions can coexist within the same society.

So what actually are the limits of the “domestic”? Yanagisako notes that we typically do not consider as households “institutions like orphanages, boarding schools, men’s houses, and army barracks” because their inhabitants do not share what we usually consider domestic activities, by which she means food production, food consumption, sexual reproduction, and childcare.⁴⁵ Yet most of these groups do in fact share food together, an activity widely recognized as a powerful generator of fellow-feeling and communal identity.⁴⁶ And while “child-bearing and child-rearing” are certainly important activities for many households, they are not necessary ones.⁴⁷ In antiquity as today, not all couples had children, and as Dorothy Thompson shows in her analysis of Ptolemaic tax registers (chapter 4), some people lived alone.⁴⁸

By this point, readers would be forgiven for thinking (probably with some dread) that I want to reinterpret essentially every imaginable archaeological site, from tombs to shops to schools, as a sort of “domestic context.” I hope it will come as some relief to read that this is not, in fact, my goal! Rather, I want to highlight the extent to which “dwelling” is a spectrum rather than an on/off condition, involving a wide range of possible activities and conditions that do not lend themselves well to a simple checklist.

I am skeptical about our ability to generate a universal list of conditions that must always be met before we declare a context to be “domestic.” More to the point, even if it were possible to create such a list, I doubt we would learn very much from the exercise. The category of the “domestic” is what cognitive psychologists call a “fuzzy set”: that is, a set whose borders are inherently blurry, and within which gradations of membership are possible. Psychologists have demonstrated that many, if not most, of the concepts expressible in human natural languages are fuzzy sets.⁴⁹ In other words, the slipperiness of terms like house, household, or domestic is not evidence that we need to work harder to define these categories more perfectly; it is an inevitable result of the way that natural languages work.

As editors of this volume, we choose to foreground the fuzziness of the set(s) that it explores, rather than trying to force the gloriously messy reality of life into artificially neat categories.⁵⁰ To that end, we have intentionally taken a hands-off approach to definitional issues, encouraging our contributors to define (or question, or reject, or redefine) “houses and households” as they see fit. The blurry boundaries of the household are perhaps most obvious in part V, “Expanding the Household: Dwelling Practices in Monastic and Military Contexts.” These chapters investigate places of residence that are organized around groups other than the family: namely, monastic communities (Brooks Hedstrom, chapter 11) and military fortresses (Gates-Foster, Redon, and Godsey, chapter 12).

Yet in the earlier chapters too, houses, households, and families prove more slippery than one might expect. As Richard Alston shows (chapter 7), families might maintain dense ties across multiple households—and indeed even multiple communities—as well as houses. Household and family organization and composition varied widely (Thompson, chapter 4; Alston, chapter 7). Sabine Huebner’s discussion of habitatio (chapter 5) explores one of the legal arrangements that might structure an individual’s or family’s relationship to a dwelling, underlining (among other things) that the resident of a house might not be its legal owner. A Ptolemaic tax register demonstrates that individuals might live not only in architecturally identifiable houses, but also in everything from shrines to gatehouses to bathhouses to shops (Thompson, chapter 4). Many domestic tasks took place outside houses, often in courtyard spaces or streets that might be shared between multiple households (Simpson, chapter 2; Alston, chapter 7). Activities essential to household maintenance might also be conducted farther afield. These could range from practical errands, like the grocery shopping that Rainville mentions above, to making offerings in temples to secure the well-being of family members.

Going further, the status of a given space as “private” or “public” often shifted over time and might be bitterly contested, with people appropriating public streets as personal property (Davoli, chapter 1; Simpson, chapter 2; Marouard, chapter 3) or, on the other hand, allowing neighbors to access routes on their property (Simpson, chapter 2) or converting abandoned houses into neighborhood waste disposal sites (Boozer, chapter 8). Concepts of the “family” were also up for renegotiation and might reach far beyond the common understanding of the family as “a group of people related by descent or marriage.”⁵¹ The Coptic monks studied by Darlene Brooks Hedstrom (chapter 11) were not biologically related to each other, but they used kinship terms, like father and son, to assert both hierarchy and intimacy within their community. Such language suggests a model of family that centers socially constructed relationships rather than biological descent.

Household Studies: From the Rearview Mirror to the Road Ahead

In a themed volume such as this, one of the introduction’s traditional functions is surveying the history of research on that theme, so that readers can better appreciate where this intervention has come from and what it aims to do. A comprehensive survey of all previous household studies would be impossibly vast: we would need to cover the disciplinary histories of, at a minimum (and in alphabetical order), anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, classics, Egyptology, history, Near Eastern studies, philosophy, sociology, and urban planning.⁵² Given the reality of space constraints, this will not be such a behemoth of a treatise. Instead, I will focus primarily on the history of household studies within one of the multiple disciplines represented in this volume: archaeology. Developments in other fields will also be referenced, but largely in relation to their impact on that one. This choice is of course not unrelated to my own specialization as an archaeologist! However, beyond such individual factors, I also believe—as I will discuss below—that household archaeology is especially well placed to contribute to current interdisciplinary dialogues about “posthumanism” and its limits.

The Creation of a “Household Archaeology”

Paradoxically, household archaeology was both a late and an early development within the larger archaeological field. The first explicit call for a “household archaeology” did not appear until 1982, in an article by Richard Wilk and William Rathje. Yet at the same time, archaeology might without much exaggeration be said to originate in digging houses; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which started out as antiquarian treasure grabs and evolved into more rigorous research programs, were early laboratories for the development of archaeology as a serious academic discipline.⁵³ However, even if those first excavators spent much of their time in domestic contexts, they did not envision themselves as pursuing “household studies” per se. Their interest was initially antiquarian and subsequently culture-historical, and they did not seek to engage with (or generate) a corpus of social theory about families, households, or dwelling. Wilk and Rathje’s essay was thus the first programmatic call for “household archaeology” as a distinct field of study.⁵⁴ This innovation followed, and was made possible by, the earlier development of “settlement archaeology.”⁵⁵ In the Americas, settlement archaeologists had used house floor assemblages to reconstruct household activities since the 1970s.⁵⁶

Wilk and Rathje’s article appeared some years after the initial heyday of the “processualist” or “New Archaeology” but was very much a product of that movement. Setting out the goals for their new subfield, the authors reproduce the aims of the processualist movement as a whole: testing hypotheses in order to generate universal laws for human behavior, generating “middle-range theory,” and interpreting human behavior in terms of ecological adaptation.⁵⁷ The emphasis on culture as what Lewis Binford called an “extrasomatic means of adaptation for the human organism”⁵⁸ led many processualists to treat ideology, ontology, religion, emotion, arts, and essentially everything else classifiable under the heading of “humanities” as epiphenomenal. Skeptical of the possibility of even studying such dubious business, the New Archaeology charge leader Binford scoffed that he was not a “paleo-psychologist.”⁵⁹

Processualist archaeology placed more emphasis on the (supposedly) “hard” drivers of history, which in practice meant mostly technological, economic, and sociopolitical factors.⁶⁰ And to that end, Wilk and Rathje inform us: “Looking at households cross-culturally, we find that the many activities they perform can be classified into four categories of function: production, distribution, transmission, and reproduction.”⁶¹ They go on to clarify these categories as follows: “Production is human activity that procures resources or increases their value,”⁶² distribution is “moving resources from producers to consumers,”⁶³ transmission is “a special form of distribution that involves transferring rights, roles, land, and property between generations,”⁶⁴ and reproduction “consists of the rearing and socializing of children… . Child care demands constant time and effort, and households can be organized to provide this constant care in different ways. Pooling of labor is a frequent solution to the problem.”⁶⁵

In other words, households, as Wilk and Rathje portray them, are fundamentally economic institutions. They are about producing resources, moving them around, and transmitting them over generations. Even “reproduction,” a category that we might expect to have slightly more emotive charge, turns out to be all about labor management.⁶⁶ Archaeologists are not to be concerned here with intimate relationships or family dynamics, but with the organization of child care duties and the question of whether or not “women’s labor” is deployable to “play a major productive role” outside of child care.⁶⁷

In fact, early household archaeology was not really about households per se. As Tringham puts it: “Household archaeology in the 1980s implied examining and analyzing social change at a microscale as a complement to analyses of social and economic change at a broader scale… . Household archaeology served to provide a richness of detail, but was not an end in itself. The ultimate target was to understand social evolutionary change.”⁶⁸

Wilk and Rathje’s essay helped to jumpstart the entire subfield of household studies within archaeology, and I do not intend to downplay the importance of their work by pointing out the ways in which it was a product of its time; after all, archaeologists should be the first to affirm that everything is a product of its time. This book, and I, are profoundly indebted to these and other scholars’ pioneering work—and to the processualist movement at a whole. The rigorous analysis of find assemblages, formation processes, and the whole rainbow of methodologies and approaches describable as “archaeological science” are dependent on the advances made by the New Archaeology. Nor do I intend to downplay the importance of research on domestic economies. Such work remains vibrant today and continues to produce important and far-reaching conclusions (and is indeed well represented within this volume: many of the contributions address economic concerns among others). Indeed, we might see households as fundamentally baked into economic studies at the level of basic vocabulary; the English word economy is derived from Greek oikonomia, the management of the oikos!⁶⁹

Nonetheless, when most of us think about the role of households and household dynamics in our own lives, it seems safe to say that we are not exclusively concerned with economic considerations. Until the 1990s, however, an economically oriented approach dominated the field of household archaeology. In areas where the processualist movement had a strong impact, such as Mesoamerica and (slightly later on) Near Eastern prehistory, Wilk and Rathje’s work inspired a proliferation of household studies centering on socioeconomic concerns.⁷⁰ The household was seen as fundamentally an economic unit as well as (simultaneously) a spatial one; households could also be described as the smallest “unit of settlement.”⁷¹ This conflation of social and spatial was, as we have seen, to be long lasting.⁷²

When archaeologists of the 1990s started to question some of these assumptions, they were inspired by developments both within and beyond their own field. The so-called postprocessualist movement had begun to reshape archaeology’s dominant goals, questions, and methods. At the same time, archaeologists were also engaging with approaches developed in other disciplines for studying ancient houses and households. Accordingly, let’s first take a look at some of those models and methods, and then consider some ways that archaeologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have sought to incorporate their insights while also developing new, archaeology-specific approaches.

Models outside Archaeology: Other Twentieth-Century Approaches to Houses and Households

Outside of archaeology, early studies of households and families often looked very different. Anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were deeply interested in kinship rules and residence patterns, which led them to conduct research on households at a much earlier date than within archaeology.⁷³ If economy was the defining focus of early household archaeology, then kinship played a similar structuring role within early anthropological studies. Importantly, some of this research positioned households and families as sites for making, not just reflecting, “big-picture” history. For example, Jack Goody argued in the 1970s that different kinds of marriage and residence practices produced a series of massively cascading differences in social organization across cultures.⁷⁴ Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of “house societies” similarly positioned households (of a sort) as central structuring principles of social organization, although the “houses” he had in mind were not (just) physical structures but powerful corporate bodies organized around kinship or fictive kinship: say, the House of Windsor, not the house down the road.⁷⁵ Additionally, Donald Bender’s 1967 definition of the household as a group of coresidents “who together carry out domestic functions”⁷⁶—that is, activities “concerned with the day-to-day necessities of living”⁷⁷—provides an early precedent for an activity-oriented, dwelling-focused perspective on households. Finally, new anthropological and sociological approaches to patterned human behavior, both within and without the household, were developed in the later decades of the twentieth century. Most important here is Pierre Bourdieu’s “practice theory,” which was rooted in a close examination of activities within Kabyle houses in Algeria and will be discussed further below.⁷⁸

Historians also took an explicit interest in households and families at an earlier date than archaeologists. The twentieth-century move toward social history, which incorporated new interests in everyday life and nonelites, helped to inspire such research.⁷⁹ Historians of the Annales school, such as Fernand Braudel, positioned households within the context of larger “multiscalar histories.”⁸⁰ A central figure in the 1970s was Peter Laslett, whom we’ve already encountered for his influential definitions of key terms. Reacting against social-evolutionary theories of family structures, Laslett made the case that the nuclear family was commonplace throughout human history rather than being an artifact of the Industrial Revolution.⁸¹ While his arguments have been criticized as going too far in claiming consistency in family structures over time, his work helped to move the discourse away from unilineal, universal evolutionary schemes.⁸² He also insisted—decades before such an approach would become widespread in archaeology—on the importance of studying “relationships within familial groups,” rather than (exclusively) “relationships between them.”⁸³

If anthropologists and historians provided archaeology with models of research on the people involved in households, architecture and urban planning provided new ways of thinking about the built space of houses. In the second half of the twentieth century, architects and planners developed a range of new theoretical perspectives and methodologies that subsequently proved extremely influential for archaeologists: for example, Hillier and Hanson’s space syntax theory, Rapoport’s conception of built space as a form of nonverbal communication, or Lynch’s work on the perception of urban space.⁸⁴ In these approaches, built space emerges not just as a container for human activity, but a shaper of that activity: facilitating some practices or social relations, while rendering others impossible or challenging. Different types of space have what the psychologist James Gibson would call different “affordances,” or potentials for facilitating certain outcomes, actions, or behaviors.⁸⁵

“Households with Faces”

In the last decade of the twentieth century, archaeologists began to consider new questions about the individuals who actually populated ancient households. An important pioneer was Ruth Tringham, who in 1991 challenged scholars to envisage “households with faces,” that is, to examine the range of identities and social roles available to different individuals in ancient households.⁸⁶ Such interventions were closely linked to larger movements within the field: first, the rise of feminist archaeology, and second, the broader postprocessual movement, which placed greater emphasis on subjectivity, identity, ideology, and experiential approaches to the past.⁸⁷ While Tringham and other feminist archaeologists were especially interested in gender dynamics within the household, they also called for research on intrahousehold variation more broadly. Members of a single household might differ from each other based not only on gender, but also age, bodily ability or disability, ethnicity, legal status (for example, free versus unfree), socioeconomic status, social roles, and much more besides.

The same period also saw new explorations of symbolism and ideology within the household. This work was often heavily influenced by the broader postprocessualist enthusiasm for structuralism and semiotics. For example, Ian Hodder’s early writings placed great emphasis on the house as a cognitive construct: a sort of idea of domesticity which, placed in structuralist-style opposition to wilderness (“domus” vs. “agrios”), helped shape the development of sedentary farming life in European prehistory.⁸⁸ Another, and more architecturally grounded, source of inspiration was Rapoport’s work on the communicative functions of built structures.⁸⁹ Even Richard Blanton’s comparative study of households, which otherwise largely centers processualist concerns and methods, aimed to address such new areas of interest as “gender relations” and “how house form communicates cosmological principles.”⁹⁰

It was also around this time that socially oriented studies of ancient households started to make more of an impact, not only in the Americas and at prehistoric sites (i.e., places where processualist archaeologists tended to work), but also in the study of ancient historical states in the Near East, Africa, and southern Europe.⁹¹ In Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, many of the most famous settlements—Deir el-Medina, Amarna, Olynthos, Delos, Pompeii, Herculaneum—had first been excavated long before. However, archaeologists working in these and other Egyptian and Mediterranean sites started asking new questions of their data.⁹² Topics of interest to postprocessualist household archaeologists, such as gender dynamics in the household, were frequently central to this work.⁹³

At the same time, archaeologists working in these regions sought to take on board many of the methodological advances associated with the processualist movement. While the so-called “great divide” between anthropological archaeology and more text-focused “classical” archaeologies had largely prevented the latter from adopting the “New Archaeology” when it was actually new, household archaeologists sought to make up for lost time.⁹⁴ Scholars such as Lisa Nevett, Bradley Ault, and Penelope Allison have advocated forcefully for moving beyond typological and stylistic analysis to contextualize artifacts within larger domestic assemblages; treating “small finds” as seriously as more monumental or beautiful objects; incorporating archaeobotanical and faunal evidence into household studies; and paying attention to formation processes.⁹⁵ Microarchaeology is also starting to make inroads today in Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Mediterranean household archaeology, despite some ongoing practical challenges.⁹⁶

Material Households

By the early twenty-first century, Rana Özbal could write that household archaeology was “no longer in its infancy” and “has shed much of its functionalist, adaptive, and ecological foundations” to address a wider range of questions and perspectives.⁹⁷ Yet while many of us might no longer endorse Binford’s reductive characterization of culture as humans’ “extrasomatic means of adaptation” to the environment, that environment—and the material world more generally—made a major reappearance in the scholarship of the new millennium.⁹⁸ The “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences has refocused archaeologists’ attention on the physical “stuff” of our subject. A broad assortment of theoretical movements, diverse in their details but loosely describable as “new materialist” or (following Ihab Hassan) “posthumanist,” have emphasized the agency of the material world: the ability of things to act on humans, not just be acted on, and to make things happen.⁹⁹ Scholars associated with these movements also tend to be wary of semiotic or symbolic approaches to material culture.¹⁰⁰ Rather than asking what houses represent, the “new materialisms” typically ask what they do.

Within household archaeology, this perspective has inspired a range of different research directions. One of these concerns the impact of the natural environment in shaping house forms. For example, Mantha Zarmakoupi shows that the architecture of elite Roman houses should not be understood solely as a response to social pressures (e.g., patrons’ need for space to receive their clients in style) or competition between rivals. Certainly, these motivations were important, but climate and environmental factors also played major roles in Roman house design.¹⁰¹ Similarly, in this volume, Paola Davoli and Darlene Brooks Hedstrom explore the impact of the (often harsh) Egyptian physical environment on dwelling structures (chapters 1 and 11). Another line of research concerns the material affordances and dependences of houses’ raw materials.¹⁰² The material properties of clay, for example, had profound effects on domestic life at Çatalhöyük. As Susan Gillespie discusses, many of this settlement’s distinctive building practices (e.g., the repeated demolishing and rebuilding of mud-brick houses) and architectural features (e.g., the uneven elevations of house roofs) were directly dependent on the physical characteristics of mud bricks.¹⁰³ Yet another strand of contemporary household archaeology explores the ways that domestic material culture shapes people’s activities, ideologies, and social roles.¹⁰⁴ Along these lines, my own work on Roman wall paintings asks how domestic representations of Egyptian landscapes would have helped to construct, not just represent, ideologies of imperialism.¹⁰⁵ Leire Olabarria similarly portrays Egyptian stelae as creating, not just expressing, kinship relations.¹⁰⁶ And in a recent study of Roman storage practices, Astrid Van Oyen shows that the arrangement of storage facilities around Roman houses had serious social consequences; no single member of the household could possess a complete knowledge of all these decentralized storage facilities, and this limitation on central control created opportunities for women and enslaved people to exercise more agency.¹⁰⁷

Although we may think of “new materialism” as a recent development, this approach (or, better, collection of approaches) to houses actually has ancient, emic precedents. In a treatise on household management by the Greek writer Xenophon, a character explains that the physical affordances of the rooms determine the activities that people can perform within them: “The rooms themselves invited what was suitable for each of them.”¹⁰⁸ Although this observation sounds as though it could come straight out of contemporary theoretical literature, it dates back to the fourth century BCE.

Decidedly not available in Xenophon’s day, however, were a variety of new quantitative and digital tools for studying exactly how houses might have impacted, not just reflected, their ancient residents’ lives. In order to connect “space” to “people,” archaeologists have often drawn on anthropological or sociological theories about the social construction of space¹⁰⁹ or the nature and patterning of human behavior.¹¹⁰ What has been missing, however, is an effective bridging mechanism between theory and data—what processualist archaeologists called “middle-range theory.”¹¹¹ While theorists such as Lefebvre or Giddens offer frameworks for conceptualizing space and social interaction, they do not provide concrete tools for analyzing the kind of evidence that archaeologists have to work with.¹¹² An exciting new way forward comes from computer-based, quantitative analytical approaches to spatial analysis, many of them developed over the past fifteen years by architects and urban planners. These include techniques for studying visibility (e.g., isovist analysis, visual integration analysis, lighting analysis), movement and behavior patterning (agent-based modeling, least-cost path analysis, spatial network analysis), and the creation of immersive virtual environments (3D modeling). Formal spatial analysis has great potential for archaeological research and is increasingly applied at Egyptian and Mediterranean sites;¹¹³ within this volume, Bethany Simpson applies Space Syntax Analysis to Roman-period Karanis (chapter 2). A major recent breakthrough has been the integration of 3D modeling with geographic information systems (GIS) data.¹¹⁴ Integrated 3D-GIS has exciting capabilities for modeling embodied, sensory experience within built space, potentially incorporating data not only visual but also auditory and tactile.¹¹⁵

Today, research on ancient households continues to explore many of the questions that animated earlier processualist and postprocessualist research programs, but in ways that engage seriously with critiques of the earlier approaches. For example, much new work continues to investigate domestic economies, but without seeking to reduce the household to entirely economic concerns.¹¹⁶ Identity also remains a major focus of interest, but with a greater awareness of the interpretive problems involved. Recent publications increasingly take pains to disavow simplistic “pots = people” approaches that attempted to isolate distinct material signatures for specific identities (ethnic, gender, socioeconomic, and religious, among others).¹¹⁷ Instead, twenty-first-century scholarship often prefers to explore the impact of domestic material culture on social identities, rather than the other way around. We may not be able to say that a particular pottery type or decoration style proves the presence of people with a particular identity—but we can ask, for example, what affordances a particular domestic environment provides for people with different embodied identities: what different experiences would have been possible for people of, say, different genders, ages, or physical conditions?¹¹⁸

Contemporary research also seeks to nuance the twentieth-century rejection of overreliance on textual sources. Within Greco-Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern archaeology, early research on households tended to center textual sources and treat material evidence as merely illustrative of insights gleaned from the texts.¹¹⁹ So when archaeologists in these regions embraced household archaeology in the late twentieth century, there was something of a backlash against the (over)use of textual evidence.¹²⁰ Indeed, by 2013, a review article on Levantine household archaeology could lament that “it is surprising how little use is made of texts in these books, given the rich sources relating to domestic life available from the ancient Near East.”¹²¹ Miriam Müller has recently advocated for the reintegration of material and textual evidence to construct a more holistic understanding of ancient households.¹²² This volume allies itself with such a synthetic approach (as most explicitly advocated by Dorothy Thompson, chapter 4).

Today, we find ourselves about two decades into the “material turn”—as a general rule, about the point at which one expects new paradigms to rear their heads. And indeed, some forms of the “new materialisms” are increasingly targets of forceful critique, even alongside ongoing enthusiasm.¹²³ Recent scholarship questions whether a non-anthropocentric archaeology is genuinely desirable (or indeed possible, given that the research papers are still being written by humans); whether the concept of “agency” still retains sufficient force if separated from intentionality; whether the appropriation of other cultures’ ontologies risks patronizing or erasing the people who actually came up with those ideas; and perhaps most compellingly, whether a “flat ontology” lets humans off the hook for the ethical consequences of their own bad actions, and thus damages scholars’ ability to produce social critique.¹²⁴ This last objection actually also has ancient precedents. Athenian law permitted not only humans, but also inanimate objects and animals, to be tried for murder.¹²⁵ However, people could also perceive this symmetry as problematic. For example, we hear of ancient debates over the accidental death of an athlete, and whether he had “really” been killed by a javelin, the person who threw the javelin, the judges who oversaw the contest, or the athletic trainer who called him onto the field.¹²⁶ In one account, the dead athlete’s father resists all attempts to blame any agent other than the person who threw the weapon.¹²⁷ The bereaved father is, effectively, rejecting a flat ontology as ethically unacceptable.

Household archaeology is well positioned to contribute to this debate. As with all archaeologists, our work depends on things: the material objects that have survived from the past. However, houses and households are also sites powerfully charged with human emotional significance. We cannot understand the functioning of domestic artifacts without situating them within this space of powerful, affective, sensory, embodied experience. At the same time, we cannot understand those human experiences without examining the ways that the material conditions of ancient households would have prompted particular sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

Archaeology is inherently oriented around the study of things—the archaia, or “old things,” for which we are supposed to provide a logos. As such, this field should occupy the very center of any movement to challenge anthropocentric biases and position things, no less than humans, as historical agents. But at the same time, the study of everyday, domestic experience also orients us toward some of the most profoundly human aspects of the ancient world: the daily activities, interactions, perceptions, feelings, and sensations that actually constituted people’s lives. And while archaeology is about archaia, it is also about logos—which means, among many other things,¹²⁸ a story. Humans may not be the only historical actors that matter, but stories do still require people to tell and listen to them. Household archaeology can help us unite the insights of the “new materialisms” with an unapologetic interest in—and empathy for—embodied, sensuous, cognitive, emotive human experience.

New Directions in Household Studies

Different scholars might well choose to emphasize different facets of the contributions to this volume, and the two afterwords provide stimulating examples of such syntheses (Müller, this volume; Nevett, this volume). Here I wish to highlight three major themes that seem to me to emerge from the chapters collected here. One is an understanding of the household as a complex assemblage, which brings together humans, material things, nonhuman animals and plants, and even supernatural entities. The second is a multiscalar perspective on ancient households, which were embedded within a whole range of larger networks that included neighborhoods, cities, states, and international systems of exchange. The third is an emphasis on people’s practices of dwelling and homemaking.

Households as Assemblages

Turning first to the household as assemblage (and further developing the theme of material agency),¹²⁹ multiple chapters suggest that the important actors in ancient households were not just human beings, but also the material things that shaped those people’s lives.¹³⁰ Darlene Brooks Hedstrom (chapter 11) advocates most explicitly for a “thing theory” approach to the agency of the physical house itself.¹³¹ Paola Davoli (chapter 1) demonstrates the ways that the physical environments of Egyptian houses constrained and shaped the forms that they could take—and thus also, to a great extent, the activities that were possible within and around them. As she shows, the design of Fayum and Oasean houses responded to the practical necessity of protecting their inhabitants against windblown sand, dust, and strong sunlight. The result was an enclosed, dark, inward-looking house structure that would have afforded privacy and seclusion—but while those affordances might have consequences for the ways people used and conceptualized domestic space, their origins derived at least in part from environmental necessities rather than exclusively cultural values. Gregory Marouard argues for another set of environmental influences on the vertical form of the Ptolemaic tower house, which he sees as originally a response to limited building space in the Delta and Nile Valley (chapter 3). Turning to the material culture within those houses, Ross I. Thomas’s contribution (chapter 9) deals with domestic figurines to which ancient people may themselves have attributed agency. While terracotta figurines of gods or other supernatural beings may look small and unimposing today, ancient people sometimes imagined them to possess awesome powers—even to incarnate deities themselves,¹³² complete with all those gods’ subjectivity, volition, and awareness.¹³³

As I have proposed above, a material agency approach can help us overcome the Cartesian dichotomy between “house” and “household,” enabling us to see the physical house as a member of the household rather than a passive container for it. At the same time, other contributions to this volume point to a role for the immaterial. As Frankfurter’s chapter shows, the occupants of ancient houses also included (or, at least, were believed to include) supernatural beings: unseen demonic powers whose visitations were an unwelcome, but widely recognized, feature of domestic life (chapter 10). Yet while these powers were invisible, they were by no means intangible; their presence could cause bodily illness and injury, and protection against their powers often included physical, wearable objects such as amulets. People might also have interpreted interpersonal violence, such as that discussed for unsafe houses in chapter 6 (Abdelwahed) and in the Sakaon archive in chapter 7 (Alston), as a concrete manifestation of supernatural maleficence. Indeed, as Frankfurter observes, some ritual curses explicitly set out to cause domestic discord (chapter 10). Ultimately, the material and immaterial aspects of household life were intertwined to the point of inextricability.

Efforts to recognize the agency of things, as well as people, are sometimes framed as calls for a “symmetrical archaeology.”¹³⁴ In practice, however, that symmetry usually has its limits. Nonliving things may have agency, in that they can make things happen and shape the trajectories of events, but most archaeologists working within what we (unsatisfactorily) term “Western” ontologies would not attribute intentionality, emotion, or subjectivity to them.¹³⁵ Here the “ontological turn” in contemporary archaeology may help us appreciate some of the ways in which ancient individuals would have disagreed with us.¹³⁶ For example, the so-called Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri make clear that in Greco-Roman Egypt, people might well have viewed domestic figurines or amulets as possessing thoughts and volition.¹³⁷

As an example of the complex interactions of human and material agency within these domestic spaces, let’s consider the interplays between the physical form of the houses and the human activities that took place within and around them. As Davoli shows, the architecture of houses and settlements in arid environments was in large part a response to those environments, not solely cultural values or individual preferences.¹³⁸ Nonetheless, that architecture could still have had consequences at both the cultural and individual levels, helping generate the linkage between spatial organization and social behavior that Bethany Simpson explores in her contribution (chapter 2). For example, enclosed houses with high, narrow windows afforded a privacy that might sometimes help facilitate the socially aberrant behavior discussed by Youssri Abdelwahed (chapter 6), as domestic abuse could be kept invisible from neighbors.¹³⁹ Such behavior would of course not be necessitated by the houses; as per the ethical critiques sometimes launched against the “new materialisms,” we can still hold human beings to account for their own destructive choices!¹⁴⁰ But the physical affordances of a space can make it easier or harder for people to pursue certain actions. Similarly, the labyrinthine street systems of Fayum and Oasean settlements (Davoli, chapter 1; Simpson, chapter 2; Marouard, chapter 3) might originate in attempts to protect against the elements, but they would also have consequences for human behavior: for example, making it much harder for nonlocals to find their way around a neighborhood, and thus placing a high importance on the embodied, intimate knowledge of urban space that results from long-term dwelling. As Simpson shows (chapter 2), such a context could facilitate complex interpersonal and neighborly relationships. The tall, narrow, towerlike structure of many dwellings (Marouard, chapter 3) could also have had social and cultural motivations and/or consequences, serving “to discourage substantial social interaction and to create a highly controlled, enclosed, and private interior” (Simpson, chapter 2).¹⁴¹ Environmental factors, sociocultural values, and individual choices were all closely entangled in these dwellings, with none entirely determining the others, but all responsive to each other.

Still other participants in ancient household assemblages were neither humans, nor nonliving things, nor supernatural entities. People in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt also shared their homes with a wide variety of nonhuman living beings, both animals and plants. Domesticated animals could be kept for economic purposes, like the pigs, chickens, donkeys, and cows who occupied the courtyards and animal pens of houses in Roman Egypt (e.g., Simpson, chapter 2; Alston, chapter 7; Boozer, chapter 8). These creatures provided food, labor, and even waste disposal (Boozer, chapter 8) for their households. Domestic pigeoncotes, like the one referenced in one of the rental agreements that Huebner discusses (chapter 5; see also Simpson, chapter 2), could be sources of fertilizer.¹⁴² Other domesticated animals, like dogs, may have been valued not only as work animals but as companions; iconography from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt suggests that dogs were sometimes kept as pets.¹⁴³ In a society where the gods frequently took animal form, animals (and their images) could also evoke divine powers and protection.¹⁴⁴ Of course, not all of the house’s nonhuman residents were welcome. People would also have shared their space with rats, insects, and dangerous pests such as scorpions and snakes. These last are visible in ritual attempts to ward them away from the house (Frankfurter, chapter 10). Plants, too, were essential participants in household well-being; not only were roofs, furniture, and many other domestic objects made with plant matter,¹⁴⁵ but most households were economically dependent in one way or another (whether directly or indirectly) on grain agriculture.¹⁴⁶

So households included far more participants than just humans alone, and yet for many of us, the main reason to study ancient households is the window that they open onto the human experience. Here the rich evidence from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt is especially evocative. Thanks to archives of papyri and other textual materials, we can track the whole history of an individual’s marriages, divorces, and disputes with their in-laws (Alston, chapter 7); appreciate both the opportunities and restrictions that shaped the lives of widowed women (Huebner, chapter 5);¹⁴⁷ explore the variety of family and household arrangements in a Ptolemaic village (Thompson, chapter 4); and witness a pregnant woman’s anxiety that she be able to stay at her own mother’s house to give birth, rather than having to go back to her husband (Frankfurter, chapter 10).¹⁴⁸ The material and textual evidence for domestic rituals (Thomas, chapter 9; Frankfurter, chapter 10) also provides vivid testimony to relatable human hopes and anxieties, such as maintaining the favor of the gods, protecting one’s children, and preventing sickness. More grimly, as Youssri Abdelwahed’s contribution reminds us (chapter 6), home was not only a place of love and protection, but sometimes also violence and abuse. Navigating their way through a world of both tenderness and cruelty, the people who lived in these households were—for both better and worse—vividly human.

There is something deeply affecting about these glimpses into real people’s lives, partial and murky though the glimpses are. One of the key sources for Dorothy Thompson’s discussion in chapter 4 is a bilingual house-by-house survey from a Ptolemaic village. In addition to painting an amazingly detailed and lively picture of a community where, as Thompson (chapter 4) puts it, “geese honked, children played outside, and courtyards were full of activity,” this document also introduces us to specific villagers such as Tharetis, who managed an Isis shrine; her seventy-year-old-husband; and their adult son, a priest of Isis, who still lived with his parents. We know nothing else about this family, but the description is still specific enough that we experience the sudden jolt of the encounter with real, once-living people in their irreducible individuality.

Multiscalar Households

This volume also makes a case for a multiscalar perspective on the household. Multiple contributions address the relationship between microscale and macroscale history (see most explicitly Alston, chapter 7; and Boozer, chapter 8). As we’ve seen, domestic activities were not just limited to the physical structure of the house, and families could maintain ties across multiple households. Other chapters demonstrate that individual houses were not self-sufficient entities, but enmeshed in the fabric of larger neighborhoods. Important areas for domestic activities, such as courtyards and streets, might be shared between multiple households (Simpson, chapter 2; Alston, chapter 7). The material forms of houses might also wind up shaping the organization of larger neighborhoods; Gregory Marouard (chapter 3) suggests in his conclusion that at the end of the Ptolemaic Period, the preference for multistory houses could have encouraged the development of insulae. The neighborhood, no less than the house, emerges as one of the key units of dwelling.

This volume thus contributes to a growing literature in twenty-first-century household archaeology that emphasizes the theme of access and communication between houses.¹⁴⁹ Such approaches have also made an impact within Egyptology, classics, and Near Eastern studies. For example, Miriam Müller has explored neighborhood dynamics at late Middle Kingdom Tell el-Dab’a,¹⁵⁰ and at Amara West, Spencer explores the conjoined “biographies of houses and settlements.”¹⁵¹Goldberg proposes that close neighbors in Classical Athens may have viewed each other as “fictive families,”¹⁵² and Tsakirgis notes that multiple houses at Archaic Zagora might share the same open area, outside their doors, as a communal dwelling space.¹⁵³ Most recently, Kondyli and Anderson investigate Byzantine neighborhoods as sites of political agency.¹⁵⁴ Much additional scholarship explores the relationship of individual houses to broader settlement-wide dwelling patterns.¹⁵⁵

If we understand households as tiny networks, as proposed above, then a multiscalar approach may help us understand how those networks connect to other, larger webs of connectivity.¹⁵⁶ At the smallest scale, the household is composed of individuals—who could, as David Frankfurter’s chapter shows, themselves sometimes be equated to houses! One amulet refers to a pregnant woman as a house, and in so doing, also transforms the woman’s (actual) house into an “extension of the maternal body” (chapter 10).¹⁵⁷ Expanding beyond the level of the house or even the neighborhood, households are situated within still larger communities: cities, provinces (or, in Egypt, nomes), states, and beyond. Lehner has argued for conceptualizing all of (Pharaonic-period) Egypt as a massive household,¹⁵⁸ and indeed, the term Pharaoh itself literally means “great house,” Egyptian per-aa. Households can also act as microcosms of international networks: for example, when people purposely display exotic-looking objects in order to perform cultural ideals of cosmopolitanism, or, conversely, use imported forms or styles for entirely local purposes,¹⁵⁹ treating the artifacts’ international connections as banal or irrelevant to their value.¹⁶⁰ To quote the historical archaeologist Charles Cobb, “Households mediate the local and the global”¹⁶¹—and in Greco-Roman Egypt as elsewhere, globalization seems always already to be glocalization.¹⁶²

Practices of Dwelling and Homemaking

In this volume, the term dwelling is regularly employed to describe the practices associated with houses and households. One of my goals in using this particular language is to invoke what Tim Ingold calls the “dwelling perspective” on ancient houses. For Ingold, a “dwelling perspective” presumes that human beings do not enter a world “to which form and meaning have already been attached,” but rather, “the world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity.”¹⁶³ For the purposes of household archaeology, this means (among other things) that domestic material culture does not come preprogrammed with a set of meanings and functions that people passively download; instead, people are constantly actively engaged in creating, transforming, and reinterpreting their surroundings. Additionally, as Ruth Tringham points out, a “dwelling perspective” on ancient houses reminds us that those houses may have led long “lives” before they entered the archaeological record, so that their forms, contents, uses, inhabitants, and essentially everything about them may have altered dramatically.¹⁶⁴ Such is certainly the case for many of the dwellings in this volume, whose chapters testify to substantial changes over time to the structures of houses, streets, neighborhoods, and even cities (Simpson, chapter 2; Marouard, chapter 3).

The language of “dwelling” also helps to foreground the practices of household life, as opposed to (just) the built structures. So-called practice theory has been central to household studies ever since Pierre Bourdieu’s classic study of the Kabyle house, with which Richard Alston engages in this volume (chapter 7).¹⁶⁵ When archaeologists use domestic material culture as evidence for everyday practices, they commonly make reference to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: that is, the socially conditioned “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” that shape our behavior, causing us to unconsciously reproduce the same social structures that acculturated us into possessing such dispositions.¹⁶⁶

More broadly, when someone asks what is really at stake in the study of ancient households, most of us probably give an answer that has something to do with practices. We may say that we want to understand how ancient people’s lives compared to our own, or the ways that different social identities (socioeconomic, ethnic, cultural, gendered, age-based, or many others) impacted everyday life, or the relationships between the macrohistory of empires and the microhistory of the household, or much more besides. To answer questions like these, we need to move beyond treating houses as static containers for people, and toward a more dynamic understanding of households as living, moving, changing assemblages.

Earlier, I considered some challenges of definition—what actually constitutes a house or a household? One way to respond to those questions, but without attempting to reduce their complexities to a checklist, is through reference to the practices of dwelling. A “house” is a place where people dwell, and a “household” is the collection of people, things, and nonhuman beings that are collectively engaged in that dwelling. Of course, the obvious follow-up question is: All right, so exactly what acts constitute “dwelling”? And the equally obvious answer is that “dwelling activities” are another fuzzy set. Some common examples might include sleeping, eating, cooking, caring for children, having sexual relations, making clothing, urinating and defecating, conducting home repairs, sweeping and cleaning, engaging in personal leisure activities, and socializing with invited guests, but numerous other examples might also be invoked, and there are plenty of domestic or domestic-like contexts from which many of the above are absent.¹⁶⁷ As with the other concepts central to this undertaking, it seems preferable to embrace flexibility rather than to attempt to force life’s complexities into the Procrustean bed of a rigid formula.

Another concept closely linked to “dwelling,” though not quite interchangeable with it, is “homemaking.” In a study of what she calls “homemaking” in antiquity, Meredith Chesson describes homes as spaces deeply imbued with their residents’ emotions, thoughts, sensations, and perceptions of meaning.¹⁶⁸ Homemaking, then, is whatever activities turn a house into a home for its residents—and the nature of those activities might vary widely across societies. Exploring the creation of “homespace” as an act of resistance by enslaved Africans on American plantations, Whitney Battle-Baptiste similarly emphasizes the importance of embodied, everyday practice.¹⁶⁹ Here we might also compare Anna Boozer’s characterization of “dwelling as place making” (this volume, chapter 8).

One advantage of what we might call the “homemaking perspective” is the emphasis it places on emic, as opposed to etic, conceptions of home. Rather than trying to come up with some universally applicable definition of “home,” or (even worse) assuming that whatever evokes “home” for us must automatically also apply in antiquity, this approach provokes us to ask new questions about ancient people’s perspectives on “home.” What did they see as essential or desirable in order to feel “at home” in the places where they dwelled? What practices did they adopt in order to achieve that result? In other words: rather than taking ancient people’s experiences of “home” as either an a priori given or an inaccessible “black box” that we have no hope of opening, an archaeology of homemaking challenges us to explicitly investigate the ways that dwelling practices generated affective, sensuous, and emotional experiences.

Many examples emerge from this volume. Domestic rituals, in which people might manipulate figurines (Thomas, chapter 9), light lamps, hold celebratory feasts, or try to compel dangerous spirits (Frankfurter, chapter 10), provide obvious examples of engaging, emotionally charged household practices. Frankfurter even suggests that rituals for safeguarding the house “might be analogized to a kind of therapy” in their emotional and cognitive effects on the people conducting the rituals (chapter 10). And as Boozer shows in this volume, even mundane-seeming tasks such as rubbish disposal could evoke powerful feelings of “guilt, shame, or regret” (chapter 8). This emphasis on domestic emotions and sensations points toward one way in which we might connect household studies to broader calls for a more multisensory, experientially oriented archaeology that takes affect and subjectivity seriously.¹⁷⁰

I also enjoy—although this is not a point that Chesson herself makes explicitly—the subtle subversion implicit in the language of “homemaking.” For many American English speakers, the term homemaker evokes a particular image, and associated conservative ideology, of a dutiful wife and mother who adheres to a rigid set of mid-twentieth-century Western gender roles. However, “homemaking,” as Chesson defines it, is not specific to any gender; it is something that everyone does, one way or another. Claiming homemaking as a subject for archaeology is thus not only a political choice but also a practical necessity. Since homemaking (of various kinds) occupies such an enormous amount of human beings’ time and energy, we will have a very hard time understanding ancient societies if we do not study it.

Household studies—particularly within archaeology—have a long history of holding the more “squishy” aspects of their subject at a wary distance. As we have seen, the first explicit calls for a “household archaeology” positioned the household as above all else an economic entity. The resulting portrayals of all domestic activities in economic, instrumentalist terms suggest a household populated exclusively by ancient accountants. And despite the subsequent impact of the postprocessualist and posthumanist movements, this initial starting point continues to shape household archaeology today. As Bruce Routledge observes, most contemporary studies still “explicitly or implicitly opt for the economic definition of households as task groups related to production and consumption.”¹⁷¹ The purposeful embrace of highly emotively charged concepts, such as “home” and “homemaking,” is thus a useful corrective to the earlier sidelining of affective and subjective experience within ancient domestic contexts.

All of the chapters in this volume deal, in one way or another, with dwelling. Do they all deal with sites whose inhabitants would have understood them as “homes”? After all, it is possible to dwell in a place without feeling at home there. In her recent work on the lives of young Black women in the early twentieth-century United States, Saidiya Hartman draws a distinction between a residence where one “settles”—essentially, one might say, a dwelling whose inhabitants feel at home within it—and a residence where one simply “stays” (even if that “staying” proves to be long-term).¹⁷²

Chapter 12 in this volume may provide one example of a place where people stayed, some potentially for lengthy periods, without necessarily feeling at home. In this contribution, Jennifer Gates-Foster, Bérangère Redon, and Melanie Godsey explore the Ptolemaic fort at B’ir Samut as a “forthold”: not a household per se, but a place where soldiers, phylakites (police), and other personnel engaged in many of the same dwelling activities (e.g., sleeping, food preparation, eating, storage, bathing) that we find in more prototypically domestic contexts. In the Roman Period, forts might indeed serve as places of long-term residence; at sites elsewhere in the empire, such as Vindolanda, we have clear evidence for the presence of children and families.¹⁷³ What then of this earlier, Ptolemaic fort? Would the military personnel stationed at B’ir Samut, or the travelers who found temporary housing in the fort, have considered it to be, on some (or any) level, “home” during their time there? Even if the answer is no—even if some or most of them actively longed to return to their own houses and families—can we find evidence for any practices that might have helped to create a more “homelike” sense of comfort, normalcy, and security, even if its effects could be only partial?¹⁷⁴ Some of the objects found at the fort may be personal possessions of the soldiers, staff, or visitors: for example, the handmade cookpot of possible East African origin, or the faience amulet (Gates-Foster, Redon, and Godsey, this volume). Might the presence of objects from home have helped recall sensations, emotions, and memories associated with “home”?

Turning to a very different context, Darlene Brooks Hedstrom’s chapter reveals the existence of ancient tensions regarding what we might call the “homeliness” of monastic dwellings.¹⁷⁵ On the one hand, ancient texts like the Sayings of the Desert Fathers idealize the notion of a dwelling place that generates no attachments and provides only the barest minimum of shelter to support life; but on the other hand, both those texts and the material record also demonstrate that many monks sought to create a more personalized “sense of place” within their cells (chapter 11). Ultimately, acts of homemaking turn out to retain their power even in this supposedly ascetic environment: “By stepping into the dwelling place, monks were making a house a home” (Brooks Hedstrom, chapter 11).

Structure of the Volume

The themes chosen for the subdivisions of this volume are explicitly multiscalar. Part I, “Households in Spatial Context: Settlements, Neighborhoods, and Urbanism,” examines the relationship of houses to larger neighborhoods and settlements and addresses ongoing debates about the nature of urbanism in Greco-Roman Egypt. Part II, “Households in Social Context: Families, Individuals, and Communities,” focuses on the scale of the individual household. Chapters in this section address the role of domestic space in shaping people’s performance of social roles and structuring families and communities. Part III, “Households in Practice: Production, Consumption, and Discard,” moves beyond the previous section’s focus on the inhabitants of domestic space to explore the activities that enlivened these spaces. Chapters in this section examine household practices of production, consumption, and discard and explore the ways those practices linked individual households to pan-Mediterranean networks of connectivity and exchange. Part IV, “Households in Cosmic Context: Religion and Ritual,” investigates religious, ritual, and magical practices within the household.¹⁷⁶ The evidence and discussions in this section contribute to recent debates about the nature and limits of personal cult, individual religion, and their relationship to state or official cult, while also adding to anthropological and archaeological research on the materiality of religion. Finally, part V, “Expanding the Household: Dwelling Practices in Monastic and Military Contexts,” investigates dwelling in contexts other than family residences: for example, monastic communities and military fortresses. Such contexts provoke questions about the nature and definition of “households” and encourage further exploration of the utility of “household” as an analytical construct.

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the household is a place where etic categories like “social,” “political,” “economic,” and “religious” become thoroughly blurred in practice. The study of everyday dwelling practices thus provides an opportunity to question the ways we conceptualize and categorize human behavior, whether in antiquity or today. Rather than representing a genuinely separate sphere of activity, households turn out to be inextricable from larger lifeworlds. This entanglement is apparent as early as part I, “Households in Spatial Context,” whose chapters consider settlement planning as both a domestic issue and a civic/administrative issue. The blurry boundaries of the “household” are perhaps most visible in part V, “Expanding the Household,” which questions standard assumptions about what actually constitutes a house, household, or dwelling. These chapters examine arenas for dwelling that are not based on the biological family. In separating the practice of dwelling from the sociocultural unit of the family, these chapters demonstrate the profound embeddedness of dwelling within other, seemingly separate spheres.

Collectively, this volume argues that a serious study of households reveals the limitations of some old, but common, assumptions about the location of agency, innovation, and historical change. Traditional historical accounts tend to represent the household—insofar as they represent it at all—as an essentially passive entity, affected by important events rather than affecting them. The real action is attributed instead to spaces such as the court, the battlefield, and the temple: these are contexts where we traditionally imagine “serious” history happening. This downplaying of the agency of the domestic undoubtedly derives, at least in part, from the perceived lower status of a space that scholarship has historically (and reductively) associated with “women’s work.”¹⁷⁷ However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, events in the domestic sphere were not just reactions to developments that “really” occurred somewhere else. A focus on households reveals the power of the everyday: the critical role of quotidian experiences, objects, and images in creating the worlds of the people who live with them. The household emerges not as a bystander to history, but as a laboratory for social, political, economic, and religious change.

Introduction: Houses, Households, and Homes. Towards an Archaeology of Dwelling

1Two sections of this chapter—the introduction and the closing remarks about the structure of the volume—are based on the opening statement to the 2018 conference whose proceedings this volume publishes. I thank Jennifer Carrington for her contributions and feedback on the original opening statement, as well as her helpful comments and keen editorial eye on the present piece. I also thank the students in two of my seminars at Cornell, “Themes in Mediterranean Archaeology” and “The Archaeology of Houses and Households,” for many productive and intellectually exciting discussions of problems in household archaeology.

2For multiregional and comparative approaches to household archaeology, see within the past twenty-five years Allison 1999a; Barile and Brandon 2004; Westgate et al. 2007; Parker and Foster 2012; Madella et al. 2013; Fogle et al. 2015; Müller 2015a; Tringham 2015; Carpenter and Prentiss 2022. On the archaeology of everyday life, see Robin 2002; Mullins 2012; Naum 2012; Overholtzer and Robin 2015; Foxhall 2020.

3For Pharaonic-period Egypt, see (from the 1990s on) Shaw 1992; von Pilgrim 1996; Meskell 1998, 2002; Spence 2004, 2015; Koltsida 2007; Bietak et al. 2010 (selected contributions on household archaeology); Kemp and Stevens 2010; Moreno Garcia 2012; Müller 2012, 2015d, 2015e; Zarmakoupi 2014, 2015; Di Castro and Hope 2015; Kamel 2015; Moeller 2016; Mazzone 2017; Olabarria 2020; Sigl and Kopp 2020; Sigl 2022. For houses and households in Nubia under Egyptian occupation, see recently Dalton 2013; Spencer 2014a, 2014b; Budka 2017, 2020. On Meroitic houses and households, see Wolf, Nowotnick, and Hof 2014; Baldi 2017.

4In Greco-Roman (and more generally Mediterranean) studies, see (from the 1990s on): Jameson 1990a, 1990b; Veyne 1992; Clarke 1991, 2003; Ducrey et al. 1993; Hoepfner and Schwandner 1994; Wallace-Hadrill 1994; Walter-Karydi 1994; Bruneau 1995; Pesando 1997; Laurence and Wallace-Hadrill 1997; Siebert 1998; Trümper 1998, 2003, 2005; Zanker 1998; Dickmann 1999; Métraux 1999; Nevett 1999, 2008, 2010, 2015; Ault 2000, 2005a, 2005b; Ellis 2000; Westgate 2000, 2007, 2013; Cahill 2002; Droste and Hoffmann 2003; Hales 2003; Reinders and Prummel 2003; Allison 2004, 2006; Putzeys et al. 2004; Ault and Nevett 2005; Tang 2005; Tsakirgis 2005, 2015, 2016a; Bonini 2006; Westgate et al. 2007; Nanoglou 2008; Souvatzi 2008; Bowes 2010; Ladstätter and Scheibelreiter 2010; Haagsma 2010; Morgan 2010; Anguissola 2012; Baird 2014; Joshel and Petersen 2014, 24–86; Huebner and Nathan 2016; Rathmayr 2017; Baldini and Sfameni 2018; Marín-Aguilera 2018; Berg and Kuivalainen 2019; Stoner 2019; Dardenay and Laubry 2020; Uytterhoeven 2020; Harrington 2021. Baird and Pudsey 2022 was published while this volume was in production and could not be consulted for this contribution.

5See Müller (afterword 1, this volume), on the greater amount of household-related textual evidence from Greco-Roman Egypt as compared to Pharaonic Egypt.

6Ptolemaic Egypt differs in many respects from the colonial states of the modern world (Bagnall 1997), but Dietler’s general definition of colonization as “imposing political sovereignty over foreign territory and people” (2010, 18) clearly applies to Alexander’s conquest of Egypt. Subsequently, the Roman rule of Egypt certainly involved, as per Dietler’s (2010, 18) definition of colonialism, “projects and practices of control marshaled in interactions between societies linked in asymmetrical relations of power.” On the devastating consequences of Roman imperialism, see Fernández-Götz et al. 2020; Padilla Peralta 2020.

7Lewis (1995) famously emphasized discontinuity rather than continuity between these periods; see further Barrett 2015a, s.v. “Introduction.” Monson (2012) has more recently reexamined the transition from Ptolemaic to Roman rule.

8Although definitions of “Hellene” were subject to much change over time: see Thompson 2001; Hall 2002; Clarysse 2019.

9See most recently Thompson 2011; Honigman 2019. The label of “Persian” or “Persian by descent” describes a military category, not an actual group of Persian expatriates (Vandorpe 2008).

10See, e.g., (since the late 1990s), Alston 1997; Depraetere 2005 (focused primarily on house plans, but wide-ranging in temporal scope); Hadji-Minaglou 2007, 2012; Boozer 2010, 2012, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2019, 2021; Marouard 2010, 2012; Daub and Griesbach 2013, 26–29; Abbas and Abdelwahed 2014; Marchi 2014; Abdelwahed 2015, 75–101; Hudson 2016; Langellotti 2020, 86–101; Cole 2022; Davoli 2022. On domestic cult and “magic,” see Frankfurter 1998, 131–42; 2019; Wilburn 2012, 95–168; Grüner 2013; Boutantin 2014; Barrett 2015b; Abdelwahed 2016. See also the growing literature on cities and settlements (Davoli 1998, 2001, 2010; Bowman 2000; Alston 2002a, 2002b, 2006; Mueller 2006; Leclère 2008; Marouard 2008; Müller 2010; Subías et al. 2011; Tacoma 2012; Boozer 2014; Fassbinder et al. 2015; Langellotti 2020) and on families and family structure (e.g., Thompson 2002; Yiftach-Firanko 2003; Alston 2005; Huebner 2007, 2013; Remijsen and Clarysse 2008; Pudsey 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015; Malouta 2012; Bagnall et al. 2016; Rowlandson and Lippert 2019). Baird and Pudsey 2022 was published while this volume was in production and could not be consulted for this contribution.

11E.g., Alston 1997, 2002a; Abdelwahed 2015, 75–101; and see now Boozer 2021 on domestic life.

12Nowicka 1969.

13Husson’s (1983) study of the vocabulary of domestic housing takes such a diachronic perspective, covering the third century BCE to the seventh century CE, but focuses on papyrological rather than archaeological evidence.

14See note 7 above.

15See note 2 above.

16Trans. Ritner 2003, 523; for the text edition, see Glanville 1955.

17Ingold 2000, 172–88, drawing on Heidegger 1971, 145–61. Building on Ingold’s work, Ruth Tringham stresses the importance of treating ancient houses as “places,” rather than “spaces”: “A place is a space that is given meaning by and creates meaning for people who pass through and within it” (2003, 93). See further Tonner 2018.

18As also discussed by Thompson (chapter 4, this volume).

19OED Online, s.v. “household,” accessed July 29, 2021.

20Note too that “house” need not refer exclusively to a physical location: consider the use of “house” to describe elite family lineages (as in the “house societies” of Lévi-Strauss 1982, 176–87), political entities such as the House of Representatives, clothing designers (e.g., Maison Margiela), or the chosen families of American Black and Latinx LGBTQ ballroom culture. Cf. the similar observations of Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zúñiga 1999, 7.

21See, e.g., Chesson 2012, 49, on caves and campsites as “residential units.”

22Cf. the distinction that Spence draws between “house” and “residential establishment” (2015, 85).

23See, e.g., Laslett 1972, 23–45, 86; Hammel and Laslett 1974, 75–79. Note, however, much subsequent critique and refining of Laslett’s definitions of family, household, and houseful, see references collected by Grey 2011, 36n42.

24Such relationships need not be limited to biological descent, but could include adoption and other social practices recognized within a society as creating kinship ties. Some scholars treat the term “family” as distinct from “relatives” in that the members of a family must live together (e.g., Alston 2002a, 69), whereas others see the concept of “family” as disconnected from questions of residence (e.g. Bender 1967, 504). On emic and etic concepts of kinship (especially in ancient Egypt), see now Olabarria 2020, 75–95.

25See note 23 above. The distinction is now fairly widely used in Mediterranean archaeology (e.g., Wallace-Hadrill 1994, 92, 103–17; see also Thompson, chapter 4, this volume).

26Routledge 2013, 208. He is not the first to point this out; among others, Rani Alexander raised a similar critique almost fifteen years previously (1999, 80–81). For Alexander, “household archaeology is a misnomer. Archaeologists do not actually study households; they study spatial patterns of settlement that include dwellings, compounds, and house lots” (1999, 81). See similarly Allison 1999b, 2.

27On the temporal depth of houses’ occupational history, and household assemblages as potentially multiperiod palimpsests, see (inter alia) Hirth 1993; Smith 1992; Alexander 1999, 81; Tringham 2003, 93–95; Rainville 2015, 17–18; Barrett 2019, 27.

28On formation processes, see Schiffer 1987 generally, and LaMotta and Schiffer 1999 on house floor assemblages in particular.

29Hendon 2004, 275.

30With apologies to Gilbert Ryle, who originally coined the phrase “ghost in the machine” as a dismissive characterization of Cartesian dualism (1949, 15–16).

31As argued at more length in Barrett 2019; see now also Barrett and Bellucci 2022.

32On objects as agents (or, in actor-network theory terminology, “actants”), see below, “Material Households.”

33Rainville 2015, 3, 6.

34E.g., on Roman Italy, Wallace-Hadrill 2008. On house tombs generally: Barrie 2017, 74–89.

35Flinders Petrie proposed that people in Roman Egypt kept mummies in their houses, although this theory is today much disputed (see overview in Gessler-Löhr 2012, 666–67). More common cross-culturally is the practice of burying the dead underneath house floors: e.g., Gillespie 2000, 140–41 (on Maya practices); Boz and Hager 2013 (on Çatalhöyük).

36See El Kadi and Bonnamy 2007; El Kadi 2016. Tombs might be repurposed as houses in antiquity as well (Ault 2005b, 140).

37Glazebrook and Tsakirgis 2016, 7.

38E.g., for the Greco-Roman world: Pirson 1999, 19–20, 53–55; Trümper 2003, 2005; Flohr 2007; Joshel and Petersen 2014, 121–25.

39Ault 2005b, 147–50; 2016; Glazebrook 2016; Levin-Richardson 2019, esp. 38–39. On the difficulty of distinguishing find assemblages from brothels and more “standard” houses, see Glazebrook 2016; Lynch 2016.

40Ault 2005b, 147–50. On the archaeology of “homelessness,” see Kiddey 2017 on the experiences of contemporary unhoused individuals.

41For a discussion of Greek sources on the oikos, see Nevett 1999, 4–20. Besides family members, the oikos could also include enslaved people (Jameson 1990a, 104) as well as the house and other physical possessions (see further LSJ, s.v. οἶκος).

42I am grateful to the students in my 2020 graduate seminar, “Archaeology of the Hellenistic Mediterranean,” for a lively and productive discussion on this point. In particular, Quinn Stickley made a strong case for the possibility that Building Z’s residents could have viewed themselves as an oikos.

43E.g., Lys. 1, Xen. Oec. See, among others, Nevett (1999) on the limits of these texts as evidence.

44If indeed they were all women; male prostitutes are also well attested, and the places where they worked were not necessarily architecturally distinct from those of female prostitutes. See Glazebrook 2011, 39–43.

45Yanagisako 1979, 164–66, 164.

46Sexual activity, whether reproductive or (usually) otherwise, is also not unknown in most of these settings. Within the vast bibliography on the archaeology of commensality, see Dietler and Hayden 2016; Pollock 2015.

47Quoting Yanagisako 1979, 166.

48On singles in antiquity, see Huebner and Laes 2019. Yanagisako recognizes “solitaries (individuals living alone) as constituting households” (1979, 164).

49Smithson 1987, 1; Rosch 2011.

50Compare Alston’s warning against definitions that artificially “bring a sociological clarity to social practices that were fundamentally messy” (chapter 7, this volume).

51Quoting Rainville 2012, 142.

52For previous histories of household studies in (some of) these fields, see Buchli 2010 (anthropology); Tringham 2015 (archaeology); Steadman 2016, 164–68 (archaeology); Barrie 2017, 109–26 (architectural theory).

53On these excavations’ place within the history of archaeology, and on Giuseppe Fiorelli as a pioneer of stratigraphic excavation, see Trigger 1996, 62–63, 290; Dyson 2006, 20–64.

54Soon followed by additional publications by Wilk and various collaborators: Netting et al. 1984a; Wilk and Netting 1984; Wilk and Ashmore 1988.

55Which is in some ways traceable back to the politically unsavory figure of Gustaf Kossinna, but came into its own in the mid-to-late twentieth-century Americas (Trigger 1996, 237, 372–82).

56As discussed by LaMotta and Schiffer 1999, 19; Foster and Parker 2012, 2; Tringham 2012, 83. An important contribution, and immediate precedent for Wilk and Rathje’s article, was Flannery 1976 (see especially chapter 2, “Analysis on the Household Level”).

57Wilk and Rathje define the household in ecologically adaptive terms as “the most common social component of subsistence” (1982, 618); declare their goals to be, first, bridging archaeology’s “mid-level theory gap” (1982, 617) and, subsequently, constructing a grand theory of “the nature and evolution of household organization” (1982, 620); and propose a list of universal rules of household organization (1982, 631–32). On the processualist movement generally, see Trigger 1996, 386–444. For a critique of the “definition of the household as an adaptive mechanism,” see Hendon 1996.

58Binford 1965, 205 (closely paraphrasing White 2007 [1959], 8).

59Binford 1965, 204.

60Thus largely following Christopher Hawkes’s famous “ladder of inference” (1954), which ranked technology, subsistence, sociopolitical institutions, and religion in order of increasing difficulty of archaeological study.

61Wilk and Rathje 1982, 621. Wilk and Netting (1984, 5) reproduce the same list of household functions, with the addition of “coresidence.”

62Wilk and Rathje 1982, 622.

63Wilk and Rathje 1982, 624.

64Wilk and Rathje 1982, 627.

65Wilk and Rathje 1982, 630.

66And not the procreative kind of “labor,” either—although that would appear to be germane to the subject of reproduction!

67Wilk and Rathje 1982, 631. The role of men’s labor in child care is not addressed, even though men did demonstrably contribute to child-rearing in many ancient societies; consider, for example, the male paidagogoi who educated elite Greek children. A tendency to project twentieth-century Western gender norms onto past societies was not uncommon in early household studies. Compare, for example, Goody’s matter-of-fact assertion that if we want to study domestic production, “Concentrating upon units of production rather than consumption means taking men rather than women as the focus of one’s analysis” (1972, 111).

68Tringham 2015, 218.

69Though, of course, the ancient word did not have the same meanings as its modern descendant. On oikos and oikonomia, see Ault 2007.

70See discussions and bibliography in Allison 1999b, 2–3; Steadman 2016, 166.

71Quoting Alexander 1999, 80.

72See note 26 above.

73For surveys of this literature, see Laslett 1972, 1–10; Netting et al. 1984b, xiii–xix; Birdwell-Pheasant and Zúñiga 1999, 1–5; Buchli 2010, 503–9.

74Goody 1973, 1976.

75Lévi-Strauss 1982, 176–87; for recent archaeological applications, see inter alia Joyce and Gillespie 2000; Beck 2007; Picardo 2015 (on Egypt); Relaki and Driessen 2020 (on Aegean prehistory).

76Bender 1967, 495.

77Bender 1967, 499.

78Bourdieu 1977, 1979.

79Yanagisako 1979, 177.

80Braudel 1972; for the quoted phrase and an analysis of Braudel’s influence on household archaeology, see Tringham 2015, 220.

81Laslett 1972.

82See the remarks of Netting et al. 1984b, xix.

83Laslett 1972, 1.

84Lynch 1960; Hillier and Hanson 1984; Rapoport 1990.

85Gibson 1986. For archaeological adaptations of the concept of affordances, see Knappett 2004; Costall and Richards 2013; Günther and Fabricius 2021.

86Tringham 1991. See also Hendon 1996, 2006; Allison 1999b, 2; Robin 2003, 312; Tringham 2012, 85–86; Beaudry 2015, 3–5. Similar lines of questioning emerged earlier in anthropological scholarship on the family: see, e.g., Yanagisako 1979, 190–96.

87Tringham’s paper was a contribution to Gero and Conkey 1991, a landmark in early feminist archaeology; see previously Conkey and Spector 1984. For discussions of these movements more generally, see Trigger 1996, 444–83; Meskell 2007; Whitehouse 2016.

88Hodder 1990, 38–41, 291; see further Buchli 2010, 508–9.

89E.g., Rapoport 1990. In this volume, Brooks Hedstrom (chapter 11) applies some of Rapoport’s ideas to late antique monastic communities.

90Blanton 1994, quoting p. vi and p. 79. Blanton (1994, 8–9) explicitly cites Rapoport as his inspiration for studying architecture as communication. However, the chief focus of Blanton’s book is economic (he wants to assess the relative wealth of households: see, e.g., p. 186). His central method—the collection of ethnographic analogies—was one heavily promoted by the New Archaeologists (e.g., Binford 1967).

91See above, notes 3, 4, and 10.

92Involving not only new excavation, but also what we might call “archival archaeology,” revisiting archival data from old excavations in order to draw new conclusions (e.g., Berry 1997; Nevett 1999; Cahill 2002; Allison 2004).

93See the discussions in Allison 1999b; Nevett 2007; Nevett 2010, 3–9; 2012; Müller 2015e; and see further Nevett, this volume (afterword 2).

94Quoting the title of Renfrew 1980; see further Morris 1994; Whitley 2001, 42–59; Plantzos 2012.

95E.g., Ault and Nevett 1999; Allison 2004; Nevett 2008, 2015.

96E.g., Hodder and Cessford 2004; Matthews 2005; Ullah 2012; Müller 2015a; Pecci et al. 2018; Barrett et al. 2020. On remaining challenges, see further Müller, this volume (afterword 1).

97Özbal 2012, 322.

98See note 58 above.

99For overviews, see, e.g., Hicks 2010; Hodder 2012; Witmore 2014; Webb and Selsvold 2020; Crellin et al. 2021. The pioneering call for “posthumanism” was Hassan 1977. Besides archaeology, posthumanism is also increasingly influential in other disciplines devoted to the study of the ancient world (e.g., Chesi and Spiegel 2020).

100Cf., in this volume, Richard Alston’s critique of symbolic “readings” of domestic space (chapter 7), though see also Frankfurter for a forceful defense of the house as a “symbolic entity” (chapter 10).

101Zarmakoupi 2023.

102E.g., Ault 2015; and see further Brooks Hedstrom, chapter 11, this volume. See also Van Oyen 2020 on the ways that Roman storage practices, and their related domestic architecture, depended on physical properties of the raw materials to be stored. For “dependences” as a counterpart to affordances, see Hodder 2012.

103Gillespie 2021.

104Precedents for this move can also be found in literature that long predates the “material turn” as we usually think of it. For example, Hillier and Hansen’s “space syntax” approach already grants agency to architecture, insofar as it asserts that different spatial layouts facilitate different types of social relationships (Hillier and Hansen 1984; see more recently Fisher 2009).

105Barrett 2019.

106Olabarria 2020, 3–23.

107Van Oyen 2020.

108Xen. Oeonomicus 9.2–5, quoting 9.2 (ed. and trans. Pomeroy 1994, 154–55).

109Lefebvre 1974; Soja 1996.

110E.g., Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984. Also influential is Foucault (1970, 1977) on the creation of “other” spaces (heterotopias) and the role of space in maintaining regimes of power.

111On middle-range theory in archaeology, see initially Binford 1977, with subsequent critique (e.g., Raab and Goodyear 1984).

112Fisher 2009, 440; Paliou 2014, 3–4.

113E.g., Paliou 2014.

114Landeschi et al. 2015; Dell’Unto et al. 2016; Landeschi 2018; Campanaro and Landeschi 2022.

115Landeschi 2018, 9–11.

116Socioeconomic considerations are relevant, in one way or another, to many of the works cited above, notes 2, 3, 4, and 10.

117On the perils of assuming such material signatures, see, inter alia, Kramer 1977; Brody 2015, 289–91; Rebillard 2015; Carrington 2019; Van Oyen 2020, 95; Bader 2021, 15–40.

118Cf. Barrett et al. 2020, 24.

119See further Nevett (afterword 2, this volume).

120As discussed by Müller 2015b, xiv–xv.

121Routledge 2013, 215.

122E.g., Müller 2015b, xv, xvii–xviii.

123For critiques of, and debates about, the “new materialisms,” see most recently Fernández-Götz et al. 2021a.

124See generally Fernández-Götz et al. 2021b; for more specific arguments, see most recently Díaz de Liaño and Fernández-Götz 2021; McGuire 2021, esp. the genuinely devastating remarks on pp. 5–6; Ribeiro 2021; Van Dyke 2021. Fowles sees new materialism as a “response to postcoloniality and the politics of representation” that is ultimately self-serving, in that it actually expands rather than decreases the authority claims of “Western anthropologists” (2016, quoting p. 24).

125Ath. pol. 57.4; cf. Plato Leg. 9.873E-874A; and see Kindt 2016, 117–22. The foundation myth of the Bouphonia festival involves blaming an axe for the death of an animal; see discussions, with an eye to object agency, in Collins 2003, 38–39; Kindt 2016, 120–21.

126Plu. Per. 36; Antiph. 3; see further Collins 2003, 32–33.

127Antiph. 3.3.

128The Greek word can also mean “explanation,” “reason,” “debate,” and much more, but it has particularly close ties to oral accounts (LSJ, s.v. λόγος). For logoi as stories in Herodotus’s Histories, see most recently Kirk 2021.

129On assemblages in archaeology, see Jones and Hamilakis 2017; Jervis 2018; Antczak and Beaudry 2019. On households as assemblages, see also Marín-Aguilera 2018; Salazar et al. 2022.

130Or “actants,” if you prefer the actor-network-theory terminology for entities that do things or make things happen (e.g., Latour 2005, 52–58).

131Drawing in particular on Brown 2001; see also below, “Material Households.”

132Or perhaps in-terrate (if you’ll forgive me the coinage), since they are made of clay instead of flesh!

133On terracotta figurines as agents, see also Barrett, forthcoming.

134See originally Olsen 2003, followed by a massive subsequent bibliography. Recent contributions include Olsen and Witmore 2015; Witmore 2018.

135“Unsatisfactorily,” in part, because of the extensive history of interconnections across the ancient Mediterranean, Near Eastern, and North African regions. See recently Purcell 2013.

136See, e.g., Heywood 2017; Crellin et al. 2021. For an Indigenous feminist critique of the “ontological turn,” however, see Todd 2016.

137Barrett, forthcoming.

138Which is not to say that cultural values and individual preferences were not simultaneously at play; see Simpson, chapter 2, this volume, for a strong argument for the former. Boozer (chapter 8) discusses the role of cultural ideas about cleanliness and dirtiness in shaping discard practices. Thompson (chapter 4) shows that house type might correlate to some degree with “Greek” versus “Egyptian” identity (though, given the often privileged status of the “Greeks” in question, economic factors are difficult to disentangle here from ethnic and cultural ones). Historical factors would also have been at play in shaping the appearance of houses. Marouard (chapter 3) interprets Ptolemaic tower houses as originally a Delta-based architectural form, which was only later introduced to Upper Egypt, the Fayum, and the Oases.

139This consideration would be relevant for one of the two locations that Abdelwahed associates with domestic violence: namely, the house interior. Violent acts committed at the house façade (Abdelwahed, chapter 6) would have been more visible to the neighborhood.

140See note 124 above.

141Note that different contributors use the term tower house somewhat differently. Marouard (chapter 3) argues for restricting this term for a particular house form of the Ptolemaic Period, while others use the term for a wider variety of towerlike domestic structures from Greco-Roman Egypt (e.g., Davoli, chapter 1; Simpson, chapter 2).

142Cf. Husselman 1953.

143E.g., Boutantin 2014, 217–50.

144For a useful introduction to religion in Ptolemaic and Roman as well as Pharaonic Egypt, see Dunand and Zivie-Coche 1991.

145See, e.g., references in the chapters by Boozer, Brooks Hedstrom, Davoli, Marouard, and Thompson (chapters 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, this volume). On the role and agency of plants as agents within the household, see Tally-Schumacher 2020.

146See, e.g., references to granaries in Alston (chapter 7, this volume); Simpson (chapter 3, this volume).

147E.g., Huebner’s chapter demonstrates that widowed women might retain the right to live in their husband’s house, but only on condition that they never remarried (chapter 5, this volume).

148This last example is actually substantially later than the “Roman Period” as typically defined, dating to the eighth or ninth century CE (Frankfurter, chapter 10), but still provides a vivid example of textual evidence for individual experience.

149Spencer-Wood questions “whether it is always possible to define the household as distinctly separate from the community” (1999, 162). Precedents for a multiscalar approach to households go back as early as Flannery’s 1976 study, which devotes separate chapters to “analysis on the household level,” “analysis on the community level,” “analysis on the regional level” (this last gets two chapters), and “interregional exchange networks.” See further the comments of Tringham 1991, 100; Robin 2002; Foster and Parker 2012, 2.

150Müller 2015c.

151Spencer 2015, 200.

152Goldberg 1999, 156, drawing on previous work by Small (1991, 339).

153Tsakirgis 2016b, 19.

154Kondyli and Anderson 2022.

155E.g., inter alia, Robin 2003, 330–33; many of the contributions to Parker and Foster 2012, especially Nishimura 2012; Beaudry 2015, 2–3; Cobb 2015, 202–3; Steadman 2016, 51–53.

156Compare Allison’s description of the household “not as a unit but as a system of membership” in a larger community (1999b, 2).

157Compare the characterization of a man’s wife as his “house” in some Jewish traditions (Baker 1998; Alston 2007).

158Lehner 2000. See also Nicholas Picardo (2015) on Middle Kingdom Egypt as a Lévi-Straussian “house society.”

159See, e.g., Barrett 2019; Barrett, forthcoming.

160E.g., Carrington 2019.

161Cobb 2015, 189.

162For globalization in archaeology, especially Mediterranean archaeology, see (inter alia) Pitts and Versluys 2017; Hodos 2017; Belvedere and Bergemann 2021.

163Ingold 2000, 153; see further note 17 above.

164Tringham 2003, 94–95.

165Bourdieu 1977, 1979. On the impact of practice theory within household archaeology, see Tringham 2015, 221; Tsakirgis 2016b, 28–31. Wilk and Rathje’s pioneering study already characterizes households as constructed through, among other things, shared activities (1982, 618).

166Within archaeology, Lynn Meskell’s concept of “material habitus” has also become influential (Boozer, chapter 8, this volume). While Meskell’s concept is indebted to Bourdieu’s, she defines “material habitus” quite differently, as the “lifeworld” or “enmeshing that combines persons, objects, deities, and all manner of immaterial things together” (2005, 3).

167For example, in many societies, poorer urban dwellings may lack kitchens, so cooking and eating may be done elsewhere (Svensdotter et al. 2020, 346–47). Sexual relations are often prohibited, at least in theory, at monastic dwelling sites (though see e.g. Wilfong 2002 on both prohibitions and violations). Small apartments, in antiquity as today, often lack space for entertaining.

168Chesson 2012, 48. On “home” as a site of powerful emotions and perceived meaning, see also Moore 2012; Barrie 2017; and compare earlier explorations of the concept of “home” in Benjamin and Stea 1995. On the concept of “home” in (Greek) antiquity as distinct from a mere place of residence, see Ault 2005b; Westgate 2013.

169Battle-Baptiste 2011, 73–108.

170E.g., Hamilakis 2002, 2013; Harris and Sørensen 2010; Tarlow 2012; Skeates and Day 2020.

171Routledge 2013, 209.

172Hartman 2019, 3–4.

173van Driel-Murray 1995; Greene 2013, 2014.

174Even in the direst extremity, people may assert ways of homemaking; see Battle-Baptiste’s work on the creation of “homespace” as a form of resistance among enslaved Africans in the United States (2011, 73–108).

175On monasteries as domestic contexts, see also Pudsey 2015.

176On the historical prominence of ritual studies within household archaeology, see Steadman 2016, 16, 249–89.

177As also critiqued by Hendon 2006, 177.

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