-
Chapter Seven: Introduction to Domesticity and Spatial Organization
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
105 Chapter Seven Introduction to Domesticity and Spatial Organization Ezra Zubrow, Françoise Audouze, and James G. Enloe A System of Activities in a System of Settings Spatial organization is an essential entry to domesticity in hunter-gatherers’ camps since there are no buildings to materialize the family social organization. The concepts developed by Amos Rapoport (1978; 1990:11–13; 1999) are particularly adapted to our goal. He defines the inhabited spatial environment as organized by a system of activities in a system of settings that are in turn organized by fixed-feature elements (building, wall, floors), semi-fixed-feature elements (“furnishings” of all sorts) and non-fixed-feature elements (people and their activities and behaviors). A setting is for him “a milieu which defines a situation, reminds occupants of the appropriate rules and hence of the ongoing behavior appropriate to the situation defined by the setting, thereby making co-action possible.” Much of this can be applied to hunter-gatherers’ camps as much as to vernacular architecture and villages or to contemporary towns. Archaeology can answer most of the questions raised within this frame: “What are the activities performed? How are they carried out? How are they combined? What is their meaning?…What is the nature of the different settings? How are they used and by whom? Who is included or excluded? What are the ongoing uses, behaviors, and activities? What is the nature of the boundaries (closed, semi-permeable, permeable, open)? What is the sequence of settings? What is the extent of relation…to the home range, areas known, areas used, or areas avoided?” (Rapoport 1990:11, 14). But it cannot answer them in the same order as in an Environment-Behavior approach. There is no other way for prehistoric archaeology than to start from material remains and to reconstruct step by step the technical productions sequences from procurement to consumption, use and discard, then the 106 Social Organization subsistence system (and when art is present the symbolic system) and the underlying ideational schemes in order to get to the people and their social organization. Spaces Organized by Uses In built dwellings, architecture predates use and a house fixes strict limits to the domestic space. A Paleolithic camp in the open, on the contrary, does not have clear limits between a domestic space and the outside since it is usually not limited to a covered enclosed area (when it exists) and since it is only indicated by a decrease of the domestic character of space toward its limits and by the decreasing density of artifacts or tools.1 Domesticity imposes its imprint on this kind of space through the inhabitant’s activities, moves, interactions, and cleaning, day after day until repeated domestic actions create specific features that differentiate a domestic space from its surroundings. As Amos Rapoport (1978:154) stresses it, such camps are inhabited by small homogenous groups that “are able to operate in an informal mode relying on shared values, unwritten rules, symbols, non verbal communication and norms. Though it is not possible to reconstruct every activity performed by a hunter-gatherers group, particularly those practiced out of the settlement if they do not let traces of some sort within it, there is enough information for sketching the activities system, for identifying some of the settings and mapping them onto the settlement’s living floor. Microwear analysis gives illuminating information on tools use and functioning as well as on the raw material transformed. It even allows to reintroduce an activity such as plants gathering and processing. Discarded flint barbs, bone points, and faunal remains of game inform about hunting, bringing back into the picture out-of-site activities that are essential within the subsistence system. Most fixed-features elements known in architectures do not exist in hunter-gatherers’ camps or do not leave archaeological traces (tents) but several elements impose constraints on circulation and use of space. An essential fixed-feature element exists: the domestic hearth is central in the organization of domestic space. It is the focus of all the activities that do not require too much space or have to be performed away from sparks. Other elements can be or become fixed features. A tent, if it exists, represents a fixed-feature element that has clear boundaries until it is dismantled. It modifies circulation by imposing a physical boundary and implies a different behavior inside than outside. There will be a need for cleaning this restricted space and evacuating...