Safe as Houses: Considerations of Domestic Arrangements and Power Structures

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this presentation we each draw on our research in diverse societies to illustrate how house structure, layout, and use all participate in creating, signaling, and reinforcing power structures and relationships, both within and between households, and even between communities. Our geographical areas of research encompass southern Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes (Ramsden) and the Far Northeast of Labrador (Rankin), but we both have a methodological and theoretical preoccupation with households as units of investigation and analysis. We find that the power-related functions of houses in both regions became amplified in times of political stress, ambiguity, or realignment. This was particularly notable in the protohistoric and early historic periods, in response to the appearance of brand new players on the political and economic landscape, namely Europeans. Attempts to accommodate these newcomers into preexisting cultural systems appear as a cascade of political and ethnic realignments, including shifts in power structures from the household to regional levels.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Hearth and Home in the Indigenous Northeast

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32095