In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A household consists of a group of people sharing a common place of residence, who by virtue of their joint behavior, function as a social and economic unit.1 With the exception of widows, the unmarried, or cohabiting brothers and sisters, the basic element of the household in ancient Greece was the family, consisting of parents and children together. An exceptional form of household was one that comprised a group, unconnected by kinship, who shared the same architectural and structural dwelling complex (Ault, Chap. 9). In Archaic Greece, a household could have been composed of one or more families, sometimes including nonfamily members such as slaves (Laslett 1972, 25–38; Allison 1999b, 4). The size of a household and the internal division of a house depend, among other things, on the following factors: the occupants—whether they comprise a nuclear or an extended family; the rules of marriage—whether patrilocal, matrilocal, or ambilocal; the source of income—whether based on agriculture, transhumance or pastoralism; and the engagement of males in military service or politics (Pfälzner 2001, 27–34). These observations also show that a household has different dimensions: the architectural dimension of the house (as a co-residence), the economic activity of the household, and the family as a social unit. As is well known, in order to identify households archaeologically we have to rely on the architecture of houses and the Wnds within them. This is, however, not unproblematic. First, the ground plan of excavated houses is commonly used for the classiWcation of houses within a settlement . This is Wne if the settlement has only one occupation phase, but if it was inhabited over some generations, the size of the household, the composition of the family, the function of the house, and changing activities over time can produce changes to the ground plan. The later building phases of a house could differ completely, in function as well as in physical appearance, from the earlier phases. This fact must be considered during classiWcation, otherwise the assumption is that no change of Chapter 2 Structural Change in Archaic Greek Housing Franziska Lang any kind took place from the original foundation until the abandonment of the house. A second problem is that few settlements are excavated in their entirety, so that the ground plans of a few excavated houses that are not necessarily representative of the whole variety of existing house-types are taken, pars pro toto, as characteristic of the whole settlement, and its interpretation may even be based on a single house. These factors are especially critical where the aim is to reconstruct the social hierarchy of a settlement according to the ground-plan of the houses.2 This problem particularly affects the pre-Classical periods in Greece, when a standardized settlement plan is not yet a common feature. A third difWculty is that social structure in Greece is highly variable. For example, the household might be identical with a house as an architectural structure, but on the other hand the family might live in more than one house. In addition, the pattern of living differs regionally so that the transposition of results from one region to another should not be undertaken without detailed consideration of the potential for variability. Finally, a detailed analysis requires detailed excavation reports, but typically only the architectural features of domestic structures are reported in detail, without adding complementary information about the Wnds and exact Wnd locations. Fortunately, in recent years this attitude has changed and more studies present a detailed analysis of rooms and their inventories, so that critical examination and a comparative social analysis of the archaeology of Greek settlements are becoming increasingly feasible. The intense interest in ancient housing—nowadays very fashionable— has focused mainly on the domestic architecture of the Early Iron Age or the Classical and Hellenistic periods (Drerup 1969; Fagerström 1988; Hoepfner and Schwandner 1994).3 For a long time, the period in between , the Archaic, was not a particular topic of interest.4 Excavators digging the Classical period stopped before reaching the Archaic phases, or excavators interested in the pre-Archaic periods destroyed the Archaic strata often without sufWcient documentation. In a few settlements some houses were documented but most of their remains are quite sparse. Finally, when Archaic houses were excavated, only their architecture was typically published, without the Wnds. This means that interpretations relating to Archaic houses are, in most cases, based exclusively on architectural characteristics, and mostly wall foundations at that. Because of...

Share