In the Aegean, hieroglyphic writing was used by circa 2000 B.C.; it remains undeciphered. The equally unreadable Linear A script was employed around 1700 B.C., while Linear B was used by Mycenaean Greeks at 1450–1000 B.C., at which point the Aegean devolved into a nonliterate Dark Age that lasted until 750 B.C.
Turning to the Americas, the recently discovered Cascajal Block is associated with the Olmec culture of Veracruz and dates to 900 B.C., thus making it the earliest known Mesoamerican writing system, followed by Zapotec (ca. 600 B.C.), the phonic system associated with Mixteca-Puebla, and Teotihuacan, Mayan, and Aztec writing systems.9
These are the regions in the world with the longest literary traditions, yet the written record covers a small fraction of these areas’ histories. A few temporal reference points illustrate this.
Detailed historical materials for Ancient Greece exist for the Archaic and Classical Eras of circa 750–400 B.C., yet archaeological sites containing stone choppers and scrapers that date to 400,000 to 200,000 years ago have been found in gravel deposits in the Thessaly region, Lower Paleolithic artifacts probably associated with Neanderthals. Subsequent sites associated with modern humans in the region date to 60,000 to 30,000 years ago. In the prefecture of Argolis, southwest of Athens, Franchthi Cave has a remarkable occupation that spans from at least 20,000 to 3000 B.C., the longest archaeological sequence currently known from Greece.10 This means that approximately 98% of Greek history falls outside of the written record.
The archaeological record from China extends back to Homo erectus, and the famous site of Zhoukodian (the place where “Peking Man” was discovered) has archaeological layers dating from 670,000–400,000 years ago.11 Between 99.1% and 99.5% of Chinese history occurred before the first Shang scribe picked up a paintbrush.
And so it goes. Australia has been occupied for at least 50,000 years; its written history begins in the late seventeenth century A.D. Humans occupied South America by some 14,000 to 12,000 years ago; the written record covers less than the last 600 years. New Guinea was occupied 40,000 years ago; its written history begins in the 1930s.
Most of human experience has slipped through the lines of texts. Archaeology is the only way those ancient lives can be recovered and added to the consultable record of what it means to be human.
The human past is a vast and fascinating domain. Archaeology is more than the pursuit of temples and tombs.
Archaeology is a way to learn who we are.
. . .
Home is central to the human experience, and the following chapters explore the antiquity and diversity of human domestic life. In this, the range of The Prehistory of Home is broader than Witold Rybczynski’s wonderful 1985 book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, with its emphasis on comfort and dwelling in the Western European tradition, or the engaging sprawl of Bill Bryson’s 2010 At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which focuses on the United Kingdom and the United States. Neither is this a complete compendium of prehistoric structures, which would require an encyclopedic coverage similar to the magnificent, three-volume 1997 Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture edited by Paul Oliver.
My objective is simultaneously broader and more circumscribed. The goal of this book is to survey the ways that small, forgotten things from the past illuminate the varieties of the domestic experience. The Prehistory of Home explores how the broad archaeological goal of understanding the past intersects with the continuing human domestic project.12
Although integral to human experience, our hominid ancestors did not always make dwellings, and the archaeological evidence for the earliest domesticities is the subject of chapter 2, “Starter Homes.” Since the times of ancient Greece, architects and philosophers have proposed what Rykwert calls “fabulized prehistories,” imaginary reconstructions about the evolution of homes like those put forth by the Roman architect Vitruvius or centuries later by Enlightenment philosophers. The archaeological evidence suggests a developmental path that was more complex and divergent, as two of our ancestral species—Homo ergaster and Homo erectus—emerged from Africa to explore and settle Europe and Asia. These early hominid pioneers were replaced by us, Homo sapiens, who left Africa in a second great wave of migration approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, colonizing the areas occupied by earlier hominids, but also moving into previously unoccupied regions of Australia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
The peripatetic nature of Homo sapiens is reflected in the archaeology of impermanent dwellings, the topic of chapter 3, “Mobile Homes.” Humans occupied a diverse array of environments, in part because dwellings were elements of their cultural toolkit. The dwellings of hunters and gatherers reflect their nomadism, whether it occurred 20,000 years on the periglacial steppes of Palaeolithic Ukraine or over the last 6,000 years in Baja California in the desert between the seas.
The development of more sedentary life is discussed in chapter 4, “Durable Goods.” While today most people live in relatively permanent houses, the process towards sedentism occurred rather late in human prehistory. In the Near East, archaeological sites dating between 18,000 and 8,000 B.C. mark waypoints on the path to settled life, when dwellings became more substantial and rooted as humans relied more on intensively collected foods and ultimately made the transition towards agriculture. Parallel trajectories are discernible in archaeological sites around the world. In Japan, for example, the abundant resources of forest and sea allowed Jomon cultures to build substantial dwellings 8000 years before wet-rice agriculture became the basis of economy, but after gathered foods had to be stored and large objects were necessary to process them. The connection between sedentism and our possessions is not new, although the problems of having “too much stuff” are faced by modern human societies around the globe, particularly in the United States. And finally, the connections between dwellings and identity are transformed when our possessions include the reliquiae of our dead kin.
Our homes are more than simple shelters or storage sheds. We imbue our dwellings with complex meanings, and our houses serve as metaphoric templates of the cosmos, a broad set of topics discussed in chapter 5, “Model Homes.” Houses become architectonic models for diverse and fundamental meanings about cosmic order and social distinctions. Whether we think about the creation of male vs. female spaces in a Navaho hogan or the implications of the term “master bedroom” in an American suburban house, humans use their dwellings as models. The symbolic analogies between house and cosmos are derived from earlier human efforts to give symbolic concepts material form, a process that began at least 70,000 years ago. However, the domestic expressions of cosmologies only occurred after the dwelling became a recurrent experience for social groups—either when nomads erected the same tents in different places or when sedentary households lived in the same dwelling for extended periods. At that point the symbolic associations of home become breathtakingly complex.
Bees live in hives, prairie dogs in colonies, and humans in apartment buildings. The origins and implications of densely settled group life are explored in chapter 6, “Apartment Living.” In eastern Anatolia, the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was a dense warren of tightly packed buildings holding residences and shrines between ca 7300–6000 B.C. Examples of multifamily dwellings consist of Banderkeramik long houses of temperate Europe (5300–4900 B.C.), Native American plank houses in the Pacific Northwest (A.D. 200/500–1950), and Iroquois longhouses (A.D. 1350–1800). In the American Southwest, similarly dense constructions include the “Great Houses” at Chaco Canyon (A.D. 900–1150), the cliff houses of the Colorado Plateau (A.D. 1150–1300), the Classic Period Hohokam complex at Casa Grande (A.D. 1150–1350), or Zuni Pueblo (A.D. 1500–present). In each of these cases, apartment life