Households as Consumption Units

In the last two decades archaeologists have also been concerned with household as units of consumption. As well as being socioeconomic units and producers of material culture, households are also consumers. Households ‘consume’ goods because they are readily available (e. g., locally made pottery) but they will often go to extreme lengths to acquire goods because they are not readily available (e. g., fine nonlocal pottery or glassware). It is often a lack of availability that makes particular goods desirable. This desirability may lead to greater importation of luxury goods, in turn leading to local imitation of them, which may ultimately render them less desirable. Thus, relationships between household production and consumption are complex.

Many studies of material-culture consumption in archaeology have stemmed from assumptions, both in Capitalist and Marxist systems, of a hierarchy of production over consumption rather than reciprocity, with consumption as a logical outcome of production rather than as an active agent in the process of production. This has led to many archaeological sites being excavated and analyzed for studies of production rather than consumption. For example, pottery is frequently analyzed typologically to investigate technological and chronological aspects of its manufacture and distribution. To investigate how and why it was used within particular households, precise information is needed on its find spots and on the variations of shapes and fabric across and between related sites - whether between a number of households from one community or between a number of related communities. For example, one can learn more about the culinary habits of a household, or a community, by focusing on the evidence pottery provides for food consumption, its social, cultural, political, and economic motivations and its relationship to settlement structures and acculturation. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons of nonlocal material culture can also provide information on household consumption and its relationship to a community’s political and economic status.