Tearing Down Walls: The Architecture of Household Archaeology

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ashley Peles.

In the 18th century the Catawba held a key position in the Southeast, drawing a number of groups from the North Carolina Piedmont down to South Carolina to join them; ultimately these groups coalesced into the Catawba Nation.  Projects undertaken by the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at UNC have investigated some of these previous 17th century communities in the North Carolina Piedmont, as well as a number of 18th-19th century Catawba households in South Carolina.  This paper uses...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Suzanne Spencer-Wood.

Historic domestic architecture interacted with gender in two ways: it expressed and shaped gender roles, practices, identities and ideologies; and the architect’s gender affected house designs. Architecture, including house design and construction, were traditionally men’s occupations. Men’s house designs affected women’s lives in many ways as houses developed from a few multi-purpose rooms in early English colonies to more task and gender specific rooms in Georgian and later house designs....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn White.

House and household have been the primary focus of the archaeological study of Burning Man. Domestic space in Black Rock City, the location of the Burning Man festival in northwestern Nevada, takes many different forms. In this paper, the configurations of house, household, and the components of domestic space are investigated. Even in an experimental municipality, where the fantastic and inventive are elemental, the household is the basic building block of the city. As such it is not only a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily S. Dale.

Chinese immigrants in Aurora, Nevada were an integral part of the boomtown community. They thrived from the town’s founding in 1861 until its final mining bust in the 1920s despite the racially charged overtones of the late nineteenth-century. Examination of the Chinese community at the household level, combining historical records and documentation with information gathered during recent archaeological surveys and excavations permits a nuanced understanding of the lives, occupations,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Bon-Harper. Fraser Neiman. Karen Smith.

The architectural remains of four houses have been recovered archaeologically on Monticello’s Site 8, home to enslaved field hands in the late-eighteenth century. Plowzone evidence hints at the existence of others. This paper brings together multiple lines of evidence to examine the degree of cooperation among residents of each house and among residents of different houses. We see this cooperation as an essential element defining households as distinct from co-resident domestic groups. Plowzone...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kevin Fogle.

The term intimate landscape is used by photographers to refer to images that capture small portions of broad scenic landscapes while illustrating their interconnectedness. I argue that the intimate landscape concept offers historical archaeologists a useful approach for interpreting discrete landscapes in and around dwelling sites. These household landscapes are dynamic spaces connected to diverse discourses at the individual, local, regional, and global scales. Drawing on examples from slave...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brooke Kenline. James A. Nyman.

Ferry Farm is perhaps most well known as the site of George Washington’s boyhood home. However, between the early 18th century and the Civil War, it was intermittently the site of multiple occupations, including the home of a former indentured servant, the home of an overseer and his enslaved wife, in addition to the Washington's and their enslaved domestic servants. The homes these families constructed were part of a dynamic landscape that shifted meaning and context throughout time. This paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Terese Newman.

With the signing of the Treaty of Cordoba in 1821, Spain formerly recognized Mexico as an independent nation. As identity shifted from colony to country, processes of modernization accelerated and rural households were transformed. These transformations led to increased attacks on the traditional structures of home life, family, and community, attacks that ultimately erupted in the rural uprisings associated with the Central Mexican experience of the Mexican Revolution. Drawing on...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Reeves.

Recent research on early 19th-century slave households at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia has focused on comparative household assemblage analysis on a number of levels including the local (between households within a single community), region (households within a market region), and the Atlantic (comparison of households between Jamaica and the Chesapeake).  An important element in this comparative household analysis is scalar analysis.  Scalar analysis is an analytical tool that allows...