Since the 19th century, the Neolithic period has been conceived as an inevitable stage of the history of human societies in Europe, taking place between the wild times of predation and the industrial civilization contemporaneous to the first prehistorians. The house is a central element of this model considered as proof of sedentarity, the end of nomadism and the beginning of social construction with the hearth drawing the household together. The lack of documentation relative to the architecture of several large geographical and chronological chunks of Neolithic Europe compromised, for a long time, any serious consideration of settlements in discussions about the way Neolithic societies were constituted, while the primacy accorded to Economy in the definition of the Neolithic led to a disregard of the settlement, seen as a sign of the accomplishment of the neolithization process.
The development of a sedentary way of life and the construction of perennial settlements are nevertheless the first signs of neolithization in the Middle-East and it is through structured village societies that this new way of life was disseminated to the Mediterranean shores. Taking into account settlements while discussing neolithization leads us to consider all dimensions of the process, and not only through the economic prism. It reveals that the neolithization process is not only the acquisition of farming and herding techniques, but also corresponds to the diffusion of an ideal village society, structured around exchange and a collective procurement of goods. Whether the first impacts of the Neolithic have been expressed by single emblematic tools, by domestic species, by ceramics and / or by long rectangular buildings, the neolithization process has only been fully accomplished when the model of the village society has been developed.
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Gernigon K., 2016 – Villages before houses? The neolithization of Europe reconsidered through the concept of the household, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 147-181.
What can the practices of discard tell us about Classic period Maya households? Most archaeological analyses of middens are concerned with an analysis of content: describing, classifying, and comparing midden contents to tell us about the people who left such remains. Yet much can be learned about households from studying the actual practices of getting rid of trash. This paper documents midden patterns from the Classic period Maya site of Motul de San José, Petén, Guatemala, and compares them with those found elsewhere in the Maya area. We reveal the ways in which trash deposition was integral to (1) defining household space, (2) marking the lifecycles of households, (3) the differential experience of social status, and (4) the possible expression of regional dispositions.
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Halperin C.T., Foias A., 2016 – Household Garbage: Classic period (ca. 300-900 CE) Maya Practices of Discard, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 126-145.
The Mailhot-Curran site yielded a total of 27364 vertebrate skeletal remains. Some forty species were identified among these remains. The Iroquoian villagers concentrated their diet on fish, but also counted on mammals, birds and reptiles to complement their subsistence which relied primarily on agricultural production. The analysis of the horizontal spatial distribution of skeletal remains between various sectors of the site comprised by six longhouses and three middens sheds light on the relative homogeneity of faunal resources distribution within this community.
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St-Germain C., Courtemanche M., 2016 – The Fauna Exploited by the Households at the Mailhot-Curran site (BgFn-2), in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 110-125.
Bone tools are abundant on Iroquoian sites and are generally analyzed using a typo-functional perspective. This article will serve as a demonstration of a demonstration of the utility of bone tools to study the household and social organization of St. Lawrence Iroquoians through intra- and inter-household spatial analyses.
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Gates St-Pierre C., Boisvert M.-È., Chapdelaine M., 2016 – Using Worked Bones to Study Iroquoian Households: The Case of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians from Saint-Anicet, Quebec, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 95-109.
St. Lawrence Iroquoian social archaeology is at the center of our investigation and households will be discussed in this paper using domestic pottery and spatial analysis of cultural remains from two village sites of the Saint-Anicet area. The villages of Droulers and Mailhot-Curran will be used for this study. Droulers is a late 15th century village, which is actually the biggest known Iroquoian village in Québec with an estimated size of 1.3 ha. This settlement was probably occupied by at least 500 souls distributed over a dozen multifamily dwellings. Mailhot-Curran is a smaller 16th century village with six longhouses distributed over 0.6 ha with an estimated population of 200 persons. Selected households allow us to study social relations between its members and their clan affiliation.
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Auteur, 2016 – For a Social Archaeology at the Droulers/Tsiionhiakwatha and Mailhot-Curran Sites, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 78-94.
During the Late Woodland Period (AD 1000-1600), St. Lawrence Iroquoians developed a seasonal transhumance between the present day Quebec City area (“province de Canada”) and the mouth of the Saguenay River, located on the margin of the St. Lawrence estuary, to hunt seals. The archaeological data highlights two types of settlements: a first type used in spring by small groups of male hunters targeting harp seals, and a second type occupied in summertime by nuclear families, when gray and common seals feed in the area. On the one hand, we find differences between the dimensions and types of spring and summer camps. On the other hand, we note that the shape of houses revealed by archaeological excavations in the Tadoussac area differ from those found in the semi-permanent settlements located in the Quebec City area and thus reflect short-term occupations related to intense seal hunting periods.
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Plourde M., 2016 – The Household among Iroquoian Seal Hunters of the Province of Canada during the Late Woodland Period (1000-1535 CE), in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 62-77.
Archaeological studies of households provide us with information about the interactions between past populations, the ways that they organized their settlements and the relationship of disparate segments of a community to each other. By examining the effects of households at several different scales, archaeologists can better understand the processes that underlie human behavior. This paper examines the Late Prehistoric Getman site in New York and the role of Iroquoian households as represented in the compartment, longhouse, and village contexts. Conclusions about equality, resource use, and the spatial organization of the longhouse are suggested.
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Rieth C.B., 2016 – Late Prehistoric Household Archaeology in Eastern New York, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 49-61.
During the late 15th and early 16th centuries AD, the Iroquoian societies of northeastern North America experienced widespread conflict and the coalescence of small village-communities into densely populated settlements. Regionally, these processes resulted in realignment of the geopolitical landscape and the emergence of distinct nations. To assess how coalescence unfolded at the household level, insights from one well-studied ancestral Wendat community relocation sequence will be presented. These data are interrogated within a multi-scalar analytical and theoretical framework which places the community at the center of processes of cultural change. The reconfiguration of domestic space, palisades, middens, and activity areas, together with their associated material culture suggest that coalescence resulted in the development of a significant degree of organizational complexity. This included the development of asymmetrical power relations and centralized decision-making, together with changes in the social means of production, increased demands on male and female labor, centralized management of household activities, and changes in social learning. The fine temporal resolution of these data demonstrate how these processes affected each generation as individuals and households responded to the challenges and opportunities of life in large co-residential village communities.
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Birch J., 2016 – Relations of Power and Production in Ancestral Wendat Communities, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 31-48.
A better understanding of the role of domestic dwellings in shaping past social relations is needed. Here, Northern Iroquoian longhouses are studied as sociotechnical systems, following Pfaffenberger (1992). This approach allows us to appreciate how social relations were generated and contested in the very activities of building and living in houses. I examine a sample of pre-Columbian longhouses from southern Ontario, Canada. Variation in aspects of house construction, spatial layout, and ritual indicates that sociotechnical networks associated with different houses were variable in scale, durability, and organization. What emerges is the sense that a dynamic, driving tension between forces of collectivization and atomization, inclusion and exclusion, lay at the heart of longhouse life.
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Creese J.L., 2016 – Extending the Rafters: The Iroquoian Longhouse as a Sociotechnical System, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 11-30.
The papers in this issue of P@lethnology are the product of a conference that was held at the Université de Montréal on October 24 and 25, 2014. The conference was entitled “Household Archaeology: production, ideology and social inequality” and was organized by Claude Chapdelaine and Adrian Burke. A total of eleven papers were presented by fourteen authors from France, Canada and the USA. The conference was set up as a symposium which allowed authors to present more detailed and lengthy presentations (45 minutes), and to allow for more time for questions and discussion among the participants. The primary focus of the conference was the comparison of the archaeological record of Iroquoian longhouses from northeastern North America with Neolithic houses from Western Europe. One additional paper that was not presented orally at the conference is included in this issue (Halperin and Foias) in order to expand the geographic coverage on households to Mesoamerica.
To cite this article
Burke A.L., 2016 – Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, in Chapdelaine C., Burke A., Gernigon K. (eds.), Household Archaeology – A Transatlantic Comparative Approach, Proceedings of the International Symposium, October 24-25 2014, Université de Montréal, P@lethnology, 8, 5-10.
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