The main part of our house was built in 1913; we are the fourth family to live in it. The wall studs are century-old redwood, the window glass has settled with age, and the oak floors have the patina of good sherry. This original part of the house was small, only 900 square feet, and after five years of living in very close quarters, my wife, my son, and I added a new wing to the house in 1999, but one that maintained the architectural lines and building materials used in 1913. While we wanted to be a little more comfortable, we wanted to do so in an unobtrusive way—much like the city where we live.
Beyond this, though, our house anchors our lives. It is where our son has grown from toddler to man. It is where we have hosted a score of Thanksgiving dinners and dozens of parties. It is where we write books, prepare lectures, read, and think. It is where we have been at our best and at our worst. It is our home.
I am acutely aware that my experience of home differs from that of ancient people living in different cultures in other dwellings, but a line of empathy threads through my archaeological inquiries into the prehistory of home. I look at a curve of cobblestones that mark the edge of a five thousand year old house in Tumbes, and I want to know about the families who lived under its thatched roof. If I come across an ancient campsite in Baja California, I strain to hear its occupants’ voices, now muted by time. If I am excavating the faint traces of an ancient hut, I am acutely aware that for someone at sometime this too was home.
. . .
Multiple meanings reside in “home.” In modern English usage, the term may refer to the place where one lives, the house or dwelling one lives in, the family or residence group living in a dwelling or place, one’s country or birthplace, a person’s or animal’s typical range or habitat, the place where something was invented or created (“Atlanta, Georgia—the home of Coca-Cola”), a place of ease distinct from one’s normal dwelling (“a home away from home,”) a sense of familiarity (“at home with”), a sense of recognition or responsibility (as in “this brought home the consequences”) or finally an orphanage, asylum, or retirement community that takes the place of “home.”5
The etymology of the English “home” untangles some of its strands of meaning.6 Home, from the Old English hām, has cognates in other Germanic languages: the Old Saxon heām, Old High German heima, and the Old Scandinavian heimr. In turn these words are probably derived from the proto-Germanic *χaim which comes from the Lithuanian kie¯mas and káima. These older versions of home imply distinct meanings and concepts. The Old English ha¯m refers to a collection of dwellings or village (a “homestead”), while the Old High German and Old Scandinavian words couple the notion of a residence with the idea of “the world.” The earlier Lithuanian terms connote a village or farm as opposed to a town, and link back to the Sanskrit ksêmas, which denotes a safe or secure dwelling, abode, or refuge.
These Gothic notions of home are rooted in the expansion of Neolithic societies into temperate Europe beginning at circa 5500–5300 B.C. Reliant on crops (wheat, barley, peas, and flax) and livestock (predominantly cattle, but also sheep and pigs) first domesticated in the Near East, these agriculturalists had colonized mainland Europe and the British Isles by 3800 B.C. The initial farming communities of temperate Europe were small clusters of households, not towns or cities. As late as A.D. 98 the Roman urbanite and historian Tacitus wrote:
That none of the several people in Germany live together in cities, is abundantly known; nay, that amongst them none of their dwellings are suffered to be contiguous. They inhabit apart and distinct, just as a fountain, or a field, or a wood happened to invite them to settle. They raise their villages in opposite rows, but not in our manner with the houses joined one to another. Every man has a vacant space quite round his own, whether for security against accidents from fire, or that they want the art of building.7
The original English “home” refers not only to a house—and explicitly not to an urban existence—but to a small cluster of buildings hacked from a temperate forest, a constructed oasis that defined one’s world. Due to this prehistoric agrarian legacy, the meanings embedded in the English word and its Germanic cognates are distinct from those in other Indo-European languages.
As Joseph Rykwert has noted, ancient Romans distinguished between overlapping concepts of constructed domesticity.8 Domus referred to the house as household, a sense combining architectural and social units. In contrast, Romans used aedus to refer to the constructed building and mansio for a place of rest and comfort. A humble rural hut—as different from a country estate or villa—was a casa and was applied to the Gauls of Iberia, which led to the Spanish word for house and was transformed into the rustic informality implied by the French chez moi.
The Greek domos (δ
One could pursue such etymological strands further, but there would come a point for which we have no written records that hint at domestic variations. Beyond the border of literacy, only archaeology illuminates the deep human experience of home.
. . .
In general, the public receives a distorted vision of what archaeology is and what archaeologists do. Television documentaries breathlessly describe the hidden riches of long-lost tombs, the moldering glories of ancient temples. With astounding luck, major discoveries are made during the three days the film crew is on site—and this happens week after week! An archaeologist directs a major excavation in the humid tropics of Guatemala, yet appears on camera in a clean shirt free of sweat stains. Archaeological research projects are presented as yet another spin-off of Survivor.
An admission is in order: I am profoundly susceptible to the romance of archaeology. I fell in love with archaeology as an eighteen-year-old, and I am still passionate about it decades later. I own copies of every Indiana Jones movie. I married an archaeologist, my best friends are archaeologists, and when I go on vacation I tend to visit archaeological sites. And I watch the documentaries just like everybody else.
But the “treasure and temple” emphasis does not really reflect what archaeologists generally do. For all the dazzle and excitement of gilded discoveries, most archaeologists actually engage in an intellectual project that is substantially more profound: “What does it mean to be human?”
Mentally traversing a path of inferential steps that would surprise Sherlock Holmes, archaeologists connect the material traces of the past to reconstruct the nature of the human experience. In his classic book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, the historical archaeologist James Deetz argued that even in literate societies with written histories, archaeology uncovers aspects of human life that are so fundamental and quotidian that no one bothered to record them.
As the adage “history is written by the victors” implies, the historical record often overlooks the lives and voices of the powerless, the subjugated, or the ignored—in short, the majority of human beings. Written history unevenly illuminates human experience. The earliest written records from Mesopotamia are cuneiform tablets dating to 2800 B.C. that principally record economic transactions and administrative matters. The oldest Egyptian hieroglyphs date to 2920–2680 B.C., texts that proclaimed the pharaohs’ authority and implemented his will. The written record from Asia dates to circa 1300–1000 B.C. and comes from Shang China; it is a historical record that, not surprisingly, highlights Shang accomplishments over those of rival kingdoms.
Contemporary