European Neolithic Houses & New-Guinean Contemporary Houses: Toward a Material Culture Theory
Author(s): Anick Coudart
Year: 2015
Summary
The archaeological and ethnographical study of domestic dwellings gives us the opportunity to grasp the logical structure which underlies the transformation of any architectural tradition, then the process of reproduction-transformation of a cultural group, and ultimately the evaluation of its sustainability. A comparative architectural approach between Bandkeramik Neolithic and New-Guinean Anga groups) allows us to extract the structure inherent in architectural traditions; i.e. the articulation between cultural rules, variations between households or settlements, and contingent differentiations. Since there is a structural correspondence between the dwelling and the collective representations that underpin each culture, it becomes possible (through domestic architecture) to measure the relative importance of the terms which describe this structuration. As each of these terms relates to a greater or lesser degree of stability, this allows us to measure at the level of the cultural 'system' the relationship between the factors contributing to stability (cultural norms) and those relating to instability (individual expressions and contingent adaptations). In other words, this allows us to investigate the relationship between sustainability and resilience, and presents us with one avenue to evaluate the logic that is responsible for the reproduction of a cultural system, as well as the potential life-span of its identity.
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Cite this Record
European Neolithic Houses & New-Guinean Contemporary Houses: Toward a Material Culture Theory. Anick Coudart. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 395488)
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Keywords
Geographic Keywords
Europe
Spatial Coverage
min long: -11.074; min lat: 37.44 ; max long: 50.098; max lat: 70.845 ;