The Greek World Lisa Nevett

Today the word “house” carries with it assumptions about the architectural form of a building, the range of activities taking place inside, and the relationships between its different occupants. But a closer look at individual examples of houses, even within a single culture, reveals almost infinite variation in the structures themselves, in the range of functions they perform, and in the identities of their inhabitants. In the context of the ancient world there has been a tendency for scholars to generalize about the appearance of houses and about the ways in which they were used. Yet here, too, more detailed examination reveals great variety in the form taken by individual dwellings, and in the ways in which they served as settings for social life. This chapter discusses some specific examples of Greek houses from different periods in order to explore some of the ways in which both their symbolic and their functional roles were defined and re-defined through time. By highlighting similarities and differences between buildings and taking a long-term perspective, it becomes clear that the inluence on domestic life of various cultural dimensions such as wealth, status, and gender, waxes and wanes through time, changing in response to external social and political factors.

Domestic Space in the Early Iron Age: Defining a “House”

A first step in our investigation is to explore what we mean by a house in the ancient Greek context, and this is less straightforward than it might at first appear. Archaeological evidence shows that the architecture of the small, relatively egalitarian

Communities of the pre-literate Early Iron Age was comparatively unsophisticated in construction materials and techniques, and in plan. In southern mainland Greece a common form of structure was the apsidal building, which had an elongated rectangular shape but with one curved end (Figure 6.1a). The walls were unfired mud brick on a shallow stone footing, with a timber and thatch roof. Inside, the loor consisted of earth packed down, sometimes with a top layer of clay to give a hard, fiat surface. Because these materials are not very durable, such buildings are frequently poorly preserved, so that elements of the organization of individual examples, and the range of functions they served, are sometimes open to debate. For example, one such building, Unit IV.5 at Nichoria in Messenia, occupied during the ninth century, has been interpreted in two alternative ways, either with a small roofed area and adjoining open enclosure (Coulson 1983:51), or as a larger, fully roofed building (Mazarakis-Ainian 1992:82).

Even where such buildings are relatively well preserved, they contain few of the kinds of fixtures and fittings which would give visitors to a modern western house some ideas about what kinds of activities took place inside, and about how those activities might have been organized. In a similar, slightly earlier, building from Nichoria, Unit IV.1 (Figure 6.1a), the only surviving architectural features to give away anything about the activities taking place are a pit containing ashes which is likely to have served as a hearth, and a round, masonry platform. A closer look can, nevertheless, tell us something about what people did in such buildings: in a similar structure, Unit IV, some of the objects found show that storage, preparation, and consumption of foodstuffs (including lentils, meat, and drink), and weaving of cloth took place. Space would have been relatively cramped, and instead of being divided up into separate rooms, the only partition walls were used to create a porch at the front and a small room at the rear, in the apse. Despite this, there seems to have been some orderliness in the way in which the inhabitants used their space: an assortment of utensils, together with some foodstuffs, were stored in the apse room. Broken crockery in the area around the masonry platform suggests that this was where eating and drinking took place. Further storage and cooking implements in the porch seem to indicate the use of this area for preparing meals. Lack of technology suitable for producing translucent materials during this period must have meant that any “windows” would have been simple openings in the walls and were probably small and high up, serving for ventilation rather than to let in light. Nevertheless the absence of partitions would have enabled daylight to penetrate much of the interior from the doorway and perhaps also from an opening in the roof above the hearth. The large interior space could also have been heated and lit from the hearth. Members of such households would have had to share such spaces day and night, achieving little privacy from their fellows. But how many people would have lived in this kind of building? What was their relationship to each other? And what was the full range of activities carried out here? In short, how similar was the role of this structure to what we think of as a “house” today?