The Prehistory of Home. Jerry D. Moore

in place and in mind, the archaeological pursuit of the elusive traces of ancient home seems to lead us to this conclusion. Long before the first Homo sapiens left Africa, more distant relatives journeyed into Europe and Asia. Between about 1.4 and 0.7 million years ago, hominids created the sites that we can recognize as temporary encampments. More anchored than chimp or gorilla nests, these sites were places of arrival and return, locations where our ancestors made stone tools and cooked over ancient fires. Little suggests that these encampments were imbued with deep meanings or emotional attachments that are so common in later human homes. Rather, these earliest camps are probably yet another example of cultural practices as extended phenotype, to recall Richard Dawkins’s phrase. In its simplest forms, home was a place where fires, tools, and basic shelters co-occurred, but—and this is extremely important—those forms of home varied. Unlike oriole nests or beaver dens, the earliest hominid residences were not identical “constructions,” but differed based on the resources used, the duration of stay, and the local environment. These earliest sites—consisting of little more than hearths and stone scatters—contain evidence of the origins of that fundamental human project, the creation of home.

      CHAPTER 3

      Mobile Homes

      Let us never lose sight of our little rustic hut.

      —Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture

      The portaledge is a collapsible platform of tubing and rip-stop nylon that big-wall rock climbers use when a prolonged ascent requires spending nights out on a sheer rock face. First designed in the 1980s, the portaledge allows climbers to make multi-day ascents of big walls in regions with severe weather. It extends the climbers’ reach.¹

      The platform is just large enough for two climbers to sleep in. A web of nylon lines binds the portaledge to a central anchor point, such as a pair of expansion bolts drilled into solid rock. A separate protection point is placed away from the portaledge; other gear is snapped into this anchor especially metal carabineers, chock nuts, or ice axes that might attract lightening bolts. A small bucket dangles from a tent pole, supporting a tiny stove for heat and cooking. Covered with a durable tent designed to both shed moisture and allow air circulation, the portaledge is a secure, though improbable, refuge in a storm.

      Few humans occupy such perilous environments as the vertical granite massif of El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley or the sheer red cliffs of Zion National Park. But just as the portaledge allows climbers a sheltered night’s rest as they dangle hundreds of feet in the air, humans use dwellings to extend their reach even for just a night or a few days. And we have done so for more than seven hundred thousand years.

      . . .

FIGURE 3. J. Middendorf, The Portaledge, circa 1990. Drawing courtesy of John Middendorf.

      The most influential American archaeologist of his generation, Lewis Binford (1931–2011) spent decades carefully examining ethnographic accounts of traditional cultures and searching for patterns in human behavior that would be discernible in the archaeological record. Explicitly committed to the scientific search for law-like generalizations, Bin-ford compiled massive data sets based on literally hundreds of case studies about historic and modern hunting and gathering societies. While those hunting and gathering societies are not static representatives of earlier Paleolithic people, the case studies suggested some basic patterns relevant to thinking about the past. Although Binford’s studies ranged over different aspects of the lives of hunters and gatherers, one analysis explored the question: Why do hunters and gatherers build such different kinds of homes?²

      One of the first conclusions from Binford’s study is simultaneously surprising and obvious: All hunters and gatherers build shelters, even at camps they occupy for a single night. This would be an uninteresting conclusion, were it not for the long-standing, Western assumptions about the rootless, au naturel existence of hunters and gatherers.

      As the eighteenth-century thinker Giambattista Vico succinctly observed, “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.”³ In Vico’s reconstruction, the earliest wild and sylvan stage occurred in the aftermath of the Great Flood, “when the impious races of the three children of Noah, having lapsed into a state of bestiality, went wandering like wild beasts until they were scattered and dispersed through the great forest of the earth.”⁴

      Similar musings form a recurrent theme in Western thought about human origins. During the first century B.C., the Roman architect Vitruvius considered the origins of the earliest buildings in his classic Ten Books of Architecture. Humans came together, Vitruvius proposed, when attracted by the unusual warmth of lightening-struck trees. Since they were bipedal,

      having from nature this boon beyond other animals, that they should walk, not with the head down, but upright, and should look upon the magnificence of the world and of the stars.

      They also easily handled with their hands and fingers whatever they wished. Hence after thus meeting together, they began, some to make shelters of leaves, some to dig caves under the hills, some to make of mud and wattles places for shelter, imitating the nests of swallows and their methods of building. Then observing the houses of others and adding to their ideas new things from day to day, they produced better kinds of huts.⁵

      The homelessness of savage nations is a theme touched on by different writers, not surprisingly by Enlightenment authors discussing the origins of architecture. In his 1791 “A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture,” the British Neoclassical architect Sir William Chambers imagined a Paleolithic idyll, in which “every grove afforded shade from the rays of the sun, and shelter from the dews of the night” and our ancient forebears “fed upon the spontaneous productions of the soil, and lived without care, as without labor.”⁶

      Chambers’s model of human origins combined an Enlightenment version of selective pressures with a Stone Age precursor of Hedonism II. The seductive tropical climate inevitably led to procreation, and as population increased, competition intensified for scarce resources. Consequently, Chambers opined, “separation became necessary; and colonies dispersed to different regions: where frequent rain, storms and piercing cold, forced the inhabitants to seek for better shelter than trees.” The tropical emigrants “at first… most likely retired to caverns… but soon disgusted with the damp and darkness of these habitations, they began to search after more wholesome and comfortable dwellings.”

FIGURE 4. “The First Building.” After Viollet-le-Druc.

      Binford’s analysis is a relief after these florid musings. He argued that the shelters hunters and gatherers build—and remember, they all build shelters—reflect, in part, their broader adaptations to physical environments, whether they live in the equatorial tropics or arctic tundra. First, hunters and gatherers vary in their mobility. Fully nomadic groups move camps throughout the year, while seminomadic hunters often construct a substantial dwelling each winter, but spread out to seasonal camps when the weather is less severe. Semisedentary hunters and gatherers construct residences that they regularly reoccupy, although venturing out from those hubs and constructing temporary shelters before returning home. Sedentary hunters occupy dwellings year-round, although hunting parties or foraging groups may journey out to find key resources and bring them back home.

      TABLE 1 MOBILITY AND HOUSE PLAN IN HUNTING AND GATHERING SOCIETIES

      Second, mobility shapes the form and construction of hunter-gatherer houses. More nomadic groups build circular or semicircular dwellings. More sedentary groups build rectangular houses. More nomadic groups either transport the building materials—for example, the canvas and poles of a tent—or they build their homes from immediately available materials.