The view from one thousand houses: a macro-regional approach to household archaeology in the Southeastern United States:

Summary

In this paper I reflect on Steve Kowalewski’s influence on my research on houses and households in the native Southeast. In the early days of my graduate training, Steve encouraged me to move away from a single-site focus and instead think about household archaeology as a broadly comparative anthropological enterprise undertaken at a macro-regional scale. It was a good idea. To meet Steve’s challenge, I constructed a database that catalogs the architectural features of 1258 structures from 65 sites in the Southern Appalachian region and surrounding areas. From this large sample of houses I identified and analyzed broad spatial and temporal patterns of variation in domestic architecture, including changes in the size and spacing of houses, changes in architectural investment, and a secular trend toward the increasing segmentation of houses. Using a theoretical framework developed from household archaeology and anthropology, I argue that certain aspects of this architectural variation can be explained by changes in household economics and household composition, symbolic behavior, status differentiation, and settlement patterning. More generally, I propose that large-scale patterns of diachronic and synchronic variation in domestic architecture are best explained by changes in social organization.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Staying Out of Small, Square Holes: The Contributions of Stephen Kowalewski to the Understanding of Human Societies at Regional and Global Scales

Keywords

Spatial Coverage