The domestic and the political realms can intersect in our dwellings, a topic explored in chapter 8, “Noble Houses.” Noble houses frequently combine multiple functions—they are seats of authority, warehouses and treasuries, arenas for political display and religious rituals—such as at the House of Tiles (2500–2000 B.C.), located on the Greek mainland, or in elaborate palace complexes of Knossos and other Minoan palace polities (2200–1450 B.C.) of Crete. This intersection of roles occurs among small-scale societies living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, among Nootka living in British Columbia in large plank houses in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the fifteenth-century Palace of Chilimassa on the far north coast of Peru. In all of these cases, politics, hospitality, and ritual intersected at home.
Just as dwellings may encode cosmological symbols, the structures may themselves be transformed into “Sacred Houses” (chapter 9). The Tabernacle was the “House of the Lord,” a tented dwelling built for Yah- weh by a migratory pastoral society. In many cultures, past and present, domestic altars are one terminus of an axis between house and temple, functioning “variously as satellite, extension and miniaturization of the local temple.”13 In other cultures, the sacred may literally be incorporated into the walls of a dwelling as rituals surround the collection of construction materials, building, and completion of a house. Alternatively, supernatural beings may be invited into the home (at least to visit), transforming the house by their presence.
It may seem an ironic contradiction, but one way to preserve a home is to burn it. In chapter 10, I discuss the different manners and cultural logics reflected in “Home Fires.” The houses of Pompeii and of Cerén, El Salvador, were preserved in ashes. Across a broad swath of southeastern Europe, houses were consistently burned during the Neolithic, apparently not by raiders or accidents but by their own inhabitants, even though this required stacking kindling and firewood within the structure. This did not mean the end of the house, but its regeneration, and new dwellings were built on or nearby the house’s charred remains. Analogous practices in distant archaeological sites—including historic Cherokee villages in the southeastern United States—demonstrate that preservation and remembrance do not require permanent constructions.
Our homes encompass and demarcate our lives, and dwellings may provide analogous shelters for souls in the afterlife. Chapter 11, “Going Home,” examines the cultural creation of parallel domesticities in lives after death. The astounding mortuary complexes constructed in the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt were predicated on earlier funerary architecture in which a subterranean home was created and equipped for life after death. In Neolithic Europe, long houses metamorphosed into long barrows, becoming commemorative constructions that anchored identity. In a broad array of human societies, the ancestors dwell in villages of the dead. Similarly diverse conceptions of the relationship between death and home characterize American society in different points in our history, as our ideas have changed about the corpse and the soul, the graveyard and the home
A final note: each of these chapters contains a brief description from my own archaeological investigations into the prehistory of home. Whether excavating an Archaic house in far northern Peru, investigating an impermanent campsite in Baja California, or documenting the labyrinthine patterns of royal Chimú palaces, I am fascinated by the archaeology of home. Thus, my specific investigations intersect with the broader themes that run through this book, and those broader themes recursively inform the way I approach my specific investigations. As the following chapters traverse different centuries and distant places, I am acutely aware of my task as an archaeologist: to recover the past and to make it part of the consultable record of the human experience.
And much of that experience occurred at home.
CHAPTER 2
Starter Homes
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home!
—John Howard Payne, Home, Sweet Home
With its thin melody that sounds saccharine to the modern ear, it is worth remembering that “Home, Sweet Home” is one of the most popular songs in all of American history. The song was born on the London stage in 1823, in a popular opera “Clari, or the Maid of Milan,” written by John Howard Payne with music by Sir Henry Bishop (the first composer to be knighted, allegedly because Queen Victoria loved “Home, Sweet Home” so much).1 A native of New York, Payne had gone to London as an actor and gained modest standing as a playwright and librettist. His fortunes oscillated between outstanding success and crushing debts. Payne wrote the lyrics to “Home, Sweet Home” in a dull autumn in Paris, when “the depressing influences of the sky and air were in harmony with the feelings of solitude and sadness which oppressed his soul.”2
The opera was a modest success, but the song was a phenomenon. In the year of its debut, some one hundred thousand copies of sheet music for “Home, Sweet Home” sold, and it was tremendously popular throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the United States and particularly during the American Civil War.
“Home, Sweet Home” was one of Abraham Lincoln’s favorite songs, and it was cherished by both Union and Confederate soldiers. The images of home tugged at the hearts of even war-hardened troops, including those engaged in the December 1862 Battle of Stones River, a bloody clash in the vicinity of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The 44,000 Federalist soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland faced the 34,000 men in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. In miserable weather on the cold night of December 30, 1862, the two armies were within earshot of each other, stretched along the battlefront of stony outcrops and cedar brakes. As the short winter day ended, military bands on both sides began to play. A soldier in the First Tennessee Infantry later remembered that “the still winter night carried their strains to great distance. At every pause on our side, far away could be heard the military bands of the other.”
One of the bands began “Home, Sweet Home,” and as the well- known chorus echoed in the night air, Federal and Confederate bands on both sides of the battle line united in the refrain “one after another until all the bands of each army were playing ‘Home Sweet Home.’ And after our bands had ceased playing, we could hear the sweet refrain as it died away on the cool frosty air.”3
Over the next three days, the two armies suffered more than 23,515 casualties, with over 3,000 dead, one of the bloodiest engagements in the western campaigns of the Civil War.
John Howard Payne died further from home than any of the fallen at the Battle of Stones River. Approaching his fifties and after decades of travail to little effect—first as a composer and then as a low-level diplomat—Payne lobbied for the sinecure of a consulship. In and out of office with changing presidential administrations, in 1851 Payne was reappointed consul of Tunis and set sail that spring. Less than a year later, he died and was laid to rest in the Protestant cemetery of St. George in Tunis.
But because of the popularity of “Home, Sweet Home,” Payne was