Important to the study of household membership in the past is, therefore, the deconstruction of perceptions that households are largely unchanging and known socioeconomic entities, with a known set of power structures. Such perceptions stem from analogies with contemporary Western societies, which view the house as the locus of consumption and the woman’s domain, but under the authority of the male head of the household. In some cases, these assumptions have even led to a view that male presence tends to be invisible in archaeological households because the material culture of households informs mainly on female activities.
Gender is not visible in the archaeological remains of households. It is largely through analogies with modern societies, through preconceived ideas about women’s activities, and through concerns for the perspectives of a male head of the household, rather than through anything readable in the archaeological data, that assumptions have been made about gender roles, gender distribution of activities and spaces, and the invisibility of certain members of the household. Notions of household member invisibility are determined by assumptions that other members are more visible. In the archaeological record of households, without some outside analogical inferences, males are no more or less visible than females, elites no more or less visible than subordinates.
Engendered approaches to archaeology expose cultural and gender biases in investigations of past household behavior, particularly those that concern divisions of labor and the visibility of gender (see Engendered Archaeology). For example, critical approaches to the roles of women in production, for distribution within and outside the household, are important for developing better understanding of gender relationships within a household. In the past, scholars studying the Roman town of Pompeii have used the discovery of quantities of loom weights in the front hall, the so-called ‘atrium’, of a Pompeian house to argue that this particular house would have been a weaver’s workshop rather than a dwelling, where male weavers produced cloth for commercial distribution. There is textual evidence that both men and women were weavers in the Roman world. A household approach, analyzing the distribution pattern of all cloth-working artifacts across a number of Pompeian houses demonstrated that weaving seems to have been commonplace in the front hall in many houses. There is no reason, in a preindustrial society like that of Pompeii, for presuming a spatial and functional distinction between the production of cloth for consumption within the household and that for distribution outside, and therefore no reason for assuming a gendered distinction in this production.
Historical archaeologists have demonstrated that even in the nineteenth century, largely European, societies, household production and consumption activities are not divided strictly along gender lines. The study of household material culture can provide information on the production and consumption activities of a household without unwarranted assumptions about the gender separation of household-focused tasks. Household archaeology can also use a consumption approach to increase the visibility of women in the archaeological record, and even to distinguish all-male households, such as in military barracks or in the temporary residences of miners.
World History
