Past household behavior concerns temporality, both in terms of the daily life cycle and the life cycle of the household itself. It is difficult to isolate the remains of a single household through its archaeological vestiges. Even at sites that have experienced a catastrophic event and abandonment, such as at Pompeii, it is difficult to isolate a single, quantified, household. Some houses in Pompeii were built several centuries before the eruption in AD 79 and may have housed a number of households. Equally, in cultures where dwellings might be built specifically for one generation, household relationships undergo change in that the original individuals may remain but may remarry and the children will grow and multiply, and perhaps move away. Nicholas David showed how the built structures and family relationship in a contemporary compound of the Fulani, in Cameroon, demonstrated the types of complex, and changing, family groupings of which one must be wary when reading evidence for households in the archaeological record. Jason Yaeger and Cynthia Robin used this concept of household developmental cycles to argue that some of the observed heterogeneity of households within the Classic period Mayan settlements of San Lorenzo and Chan Ncoohol near Xuantunich in Belize - settlements previously thought to be those of ‘uniform, homogeneous peasantry’ - documented consecutive generations residing within established households, with differing family groups and labor access. These developmental cycles indicate that most archaeological sites involve what have been termed ‘household series’. Household archaeology has to consider the potential variation in household organization over time. Only at sites that are abandoned after a brief occupation, such as hunter-gatherer sites or military camps destroyed during battle, might single-period households be assumed. In general, the archaeological remains of households are best employed to investigate patterns of household behavior that may persist over generations.
Household archaeologists also have to be aware of the changing use of space throughout the day and avoid making overly simplistic ascriptions of static functions to domestic spaces. An area of the house where some household members may meet to conduct business with outsiders at certain times of the day may be given over to household production and more domestic activities by other members of the household at other times of day. This might well be the case in the front halls in Pompeian houses. Textual references and the display furniture found in these areas may indicate that this space was used for the morning ‘salutatio’, when the owner of the house would meet his clients. Perhaps this space was used for weaving later in the day, although we cannot necessarily assume this temporal segregation from the archaeological evidence. Given the difficulties of isolating the activities of single households, separating out the daily organization of activities through archaeological remains is practically impossible, without use of analogy.
World History
