A key role has been played by references to domestic buildings and their patterns of use in surviving ancient texts. The numbers and genres of such accounts vary depend-
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Ing on the period in question, but for any given location and century there are rarely more than a handful of relevant passages. Among them, detailed descriptions of individual dwellings are relatively uncommon compared with isolated details about the form or use of a domestic building. Most Greek references date to the fifth and fourth centuries bc and are by Athenian authors. Roman writers offer a larger number of detailed descriptions, although they cover a wider geographical and chronological span, and while many key passages were produced in early imperial Italy, relevant material is also found in provincial works. Such accounts are obviously useful in providing first-hand observations about various aspects of ancient housing, but they do not represent a large number of examples and so are likely to be unrepresentative. As with any text the context also needs to be assessed: each work was composed with a particular purpose in mind, and each author articulates only a limited viewpoint - that of the elite, male population.
Since the nineteenth century the importance of archaeological data has gradually increased as more domestic structures have been discovered and excavated, although written texts have continued to play a central role in their interpretation. Excavators’ aims have generally been relatively straightforward. Key questions have been the date of construction and any subsequent phases of rebuilding, details of the plan, decoration and superstructure, and in some cases also the uses of individual rooms. Attention centered on the architectural remains. If collected at all, small finds (such as fragments of pottery, or coins and other metal objects) were either used only very selectively to date the architecture, or were cataloged and published in separate lists according to the materials of which they were made, with little or no indication of the precise location in which they were found or of the other objects found with them. The terminology of ancient authors, particularly Vitruvius, has customarily been used to label different spaces, and assumptions about the uses of rooms have often tended to be influenced as much by the ancient texts as by the architecture and the items found there. In the late nineteenth century the popularity of evolutionary theories, combined with contemporary ideas about the close relationship between Greek and Roman cultures, led to a conflation of data from different dates and locations. The result was a model which embraced all known excavated residential structures and traced a single, continuous path of development from the Late Bronze Age palatial buildings at Greek sites like Mycenae, through the Hellenistic to early Roman houses on the Cycladic island of Delos, down to the Roman mansions of Pompeii and Herculaneum preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. A gap in the material evidence for the classical period in the Greek world was filled partly by concentrating on texts of that period and partly by using earlier and later archaeological sites, notably Pompeii (for example Rider 1916: chap. 16).
As more areas of housing were uncovered during the earlier twentieth century, the diversity of building forms became clearer and a distinction developed between work on Greek and on Roman housing. In the Greek context publication of relatively large residential areas in the cities of Delos, Priene (western Turkey) and Olynthos (Greek Macedonia) facilitated formulation of an architectural typology based on Vitruvius’s description of Greek houses (see section 2 below). This typological approach has continued to be followed as a means of contextualizing structures found at a single site within a wider body of evidence. For Roman material a broader variety of approaches was followed. In part this was due to the greater number and better preservation of many sites, together with the large size and lavish decoration of some of the dwellings themselves (see section 3 below). Nevertheless the vast area encompassed by the Roman empire has also played a role, since in some provinces (for example, Britain) Roman housing has been viewed more in the context of the longterm cultural development of the region, rather than being compared with contemporary structures elsewhere in the empire. Thus, in Italy questions about decorative styles were often prominent (for example Mau 1899), while elsewhere the aim was frequently more basic, focusing, for instance, on identifying “Greek” or “Roman” architectural features (for example Gsell 1901: 15).
Recently, the emphasis of some archaeological work has shifted: advances made in other disciplines such as prehistoric archaeology and ethnography have suggested new ways of looking at the evidence. These place more emphasis on identifying complete functional groups of objects and understanding how different activities were arranged in relation to the architecture. Cross-cultural work shows wide variation in the way housing is conceptualized and activities separated and combined, stressing the importance of setting aside modern assumptions about how a house is defined, how its space is organized, who is permitted to enter, and how they are expected to behave. It is now clear that the domestic sphere is shaped by the social customs and cultural attitudes of the wider community, and investigation of ancient housing has therefore come to be understood as a route to explore a variety of much broader questions. Some of the insights stimulated by this new view of ancient housing are touched on below.
World History
