"The Prehistory of Home addresses a topic of widely shared interest, and provides easy-to-understand evidence and well-argued interpretations. Jerry Moore is deft with words, phrasing, and building arguments, shifting effortlessly between antiquity and today while keeping the themes of home and prehistory clear. Alongside the rigorous archaeological and scientific research, Moore's wit and personality shine throughout." Wendy Ashmore, coauthor of Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past

Jerry Moore's The Prehistory of Home reflects the best of anthropological archaeology made accessible to the general audience. From the earliest human dwellings some 400,000 years ago to suburban California ranch houses today, Moore presents a comparative approach to the social, symbolic, and political dimensions of the house across societies in different times and places. Along the way, he points out how homes function to shield people from the elements, display equality or proclaim social divides, and connect the sacred and the domestic into a single place. More important, Dr. Moore keeps archaeology as the backbone of the narrative by describing his own archaeological investigations into the prehistory of home in each chapter. For these reasons, lay people and archaeologists alike will be informed and intrigued by a masterfully written book full of insight, humor, and information about a place we call home. From Society of American Archaeology 2014 Book Award--Popular Category.

Jerry D. Moore is Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills.  He has conducted archaeological investigations in Peru, Baja California, California, and southern Mexico. He is the author of Architecture and Power in the Ancient Andes (Cambridge), Cultural Landscapes in the Prehispanic Andes (University Press of Florida), and Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Altamira Press/Rowman and Littlefield).  He is the editor of Visions of Culture: An Annotated Reader and co-editor of The Prehistory of Baja California: Advances in the Archaeology of the Forgotten Peninsula (with Don Laylander).

The Prehistory of Home

By Jerry D. Moore

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27221-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii,
Acknowledgments, ix,
1. The Prehistory of Home, 1,
2. Starter Homes, 15,
3. Mobile Homes, 32,
4. Durable Goods, 48,
5. Model Homes, 70,
6. Apartment Living, 93,
7. Gated Communities, 116,
8. Noble Houses, 141,
9. Sacred Homes, 162,
10. Home Fires, 180,
11. Going Home, 202,
12. Conclusion, 220,
Notes, 227,
Illustration Credits, 261,
Index, 265,

CHAPTER 1

The Prehistory of Home

Our trowels scrape through time. A dozen of us—archaeologists, students, and workmen—are excavating in far northern Peru. Digging through hard layers of ash-black clay and past thick jumbles of ancient oyster shells, we carefully scoop up the loosened midden and sieve it through dry shaker screens, trapping durable potsherds and glinting flakes of obsidian. We watch for traces of archaic structures: postholes from long-gone timbers, subtle variations in soil color and texture, a slightly more compacted surface. We speak in low voices as we dig, afraid that any distraction will cause us to miss the ancient traces of home.

Various animals build shelters, but only humans build homes. Humans build dwellings in different environments, constructed with diverse materials and in distinct forms, and associated with nuanced meanings. We have done this for millennia.

No other species lives in such a variety of shelters. Despite the diversity of the constructions that other animals create—the pendulous baskets of oriole nests, the intricate dens of prairie dogs, or the decorated nests of bowerbirds—humans construct the broadest array of dwellings on Earth.

Our words for "dwelling" point to this diversity:

Palace, hovel, hogan, ranch house, croft.
Tipi, chalet, duplex, kraal.
Igloo, bungalow, billet, cabin.
Cottage, crannog, adobe, manor.
Wickiup, villa, lean-to, abbey.
Hacienda, barrack, lodge, shanty.
Pithouse, penthouse, pueblo, condo.

In the Kalahari Desert, !Kung San women construct veldt-brush windbreaks for their families in less than an hour, a dwelling abandoned in a few days when the foraging band moves on.

Among the Toraja of Sulawesi, the saddleback roof and sweeping facades of noble "origin houses" (tongkonan) link generations of kinfolk and spatially anchor rituals shared by members of "house societies."

And in Beverly Hills, the home of the late television producer Aaron Spelling was put up for sale in March 2009 and finally sold in July 2011 for a discounted price of $85 million to the 22-year-old British heiress, Petra Ecclestone. Generally considered the largest home in Los Angeles County, the 56,500-square-foot, 123-room mansion on six acres includes such amenities as four wet-bars, a screening room, a bowling alley, a gift-wrapping room, parking for one hundred cars, and a 17,000-square-foot attic containing a beauty salon and a barbershop. Built in a "French chateau style," the Spelling house is nonetheless only one-fourth the size of the Palace of Versailles.

All these places are homes.

The social anthropologist Timothy Ingold has written about the difference between "animal architecture" and our buildings. Comparing, as an example, beaver lodges to human dwellings, Ingold notes that "wherever they are, beavers construct the same kinds of lodges.... Human beings, by contrast, build houses of very diverse kinds, and although certain house forms have persisted for long periods, there is unequivocal evidence that these forms have also undergone significant historical change." As the instinctual expression of the beaver's evolutionary legacy, "the beaver is no more the designer of the lodge than is the mollusk the designer of its shell.... Human beings, on the other hand, are the authors of their own designs, constructed through a self-conscious decision process—an intentional selection of ideas."

The human creation of home—as dwelling, as social unit, as metaphor—is extraordinarily varied; every home is a constructed compromise. As the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has written, "Unlike even the most elaborate animal construction, human building involves decision and choice, always and inevitably; it therefore involves a project."

Such projects counterpoise decisions about different issues—cost, material constraints, environmental stresses, functions, style, social statuses, and symbolic contents, among others—and then express a specific resolution of those issues in architectural form. This is true of all buildings, whenever and wherever humans have constructed them.

And this is particularly true of homes. In addition to their basic and fundamental function of providing shelter from natural elements, dwellings are powerful and complex concentrates of human existence. More than passive backdrops to human actions, our dwellings reflect and shape our lives. Dwellings are powerful condensers of meanings, second only to the human body as a model for thinking about the world. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun," and those webs thickly drape our homes.

This is all relatively obvious: humans build and occupy a diversity of dwellings, those constructions require assessing multiple factors, and dwellings are a pivotal place around which humans construct cultural meanings. Yet, two facts make these relatively noncontentious propositions challenging.

First, the specific constellations of dimensions and meanings encoded by dwellings are extraordinarily variable and complex. And this truth was made abundantly clear to me during a long and confused conversation with a campesino in far northern Peru.

Since 1996 I have conducted archaeological investigations in the Department of Tumbes, on Peru's tropical northern frontier. A distinctive type of vernacular architecture is built in Tumbes known as tabique. The building technique uses natural materials from the dry scrub forest, a thicket of thorn-covered shrubs, vines, and cacti interspersed with kapok and algarobbo trees. Although the vegetation is dense, few trees grow sufficiently tall or straight to be sawn into boards.

Tabique buildings accommodate these material constraints. The dwellings are rectangular in plan, framed by upright posts planted in the corners and at 1- to 2-meter intervals along the wall. Horizontal paired lengths of split bamboo are tied or nailed onto the inside and outside of the uprights posts, leaving a 5- to 10-centimeter gap into which sticks are jammed. The wedged sticks form the fabric of the wall, which may be left as a ragged comb of sticks or—if the residents can afford it—a plasterer is hired to slather the tabique wall with daub mixed from clay and steer manure.

In 2003 we were excavating a small site, and I was walking near the site when I saw a man making adobe bricks. The man recognized me as the gringo archaeologist, and we began to chat.

The man already had a house made from tabique, so I was curious why he was preparing to build another house of adobes. In the tropics, wooden structures are usually felled by rot and termites, so I assumed that the tabique house was approaching the end of its use-life. This simple assumption was profoundly wrong.

The man and I exchanged "buenos días" and then I said the obvious:

"I see you're making adobes."

"Yes, señor."

"Is your tabique house very old?"

"No, señor, it is only a few years old. It's a good, solid house."

"So, why are you making adobe bricks?"

"Because there is no work around here."

I paused to digest this information. "Are you going to sell the bricks?"

"No, I am going to build a new house. My wife left me."

Another pause.

"Do you think she will come back if you build a new house for her?"

"No, señor. She ran off with that son-of-a-bitch, Guillermo Flores. She's never coming back." He shook his head in disgust.

"So, why are you building a new house?"

"Because there is no work around here."

At this point I was completely confused: "I'm sorry—I don't understand. Why are you building a new house?"

The man gave me a look reserved for the mentally challenged: "There is no work around here. I have to go to town to find work. My wife left me, so there will be no one here to watch over my belongings. Anyone can break into a tabique house. So I have to build a stronger house of adobe bricks."

It was an ethnographic encounter reminiscent of the story of the Three Little Pigs.

In a marvelously pragmatic but complex way, this man's decision to build a house of adobes was based on his own technical expertise, his access to raw materials, regional socioeconomic factors, security concerns, and his matrimonial tumults. Far from being a straightforward matter of imposing a mental construct onto passive raw materials, this house reflected multiple decision domains.

And every house always does.

Thus, the first factor that makes understanding human dwellings so interesting and challenging is that they are the material expressions of intersecting considerations. Our homes provide shelter and they express our identities. Dwellings enclose social groups of various sizes, from single individuals to entire religious communities. Houses vary in size, permanence, symbolic valence, functions, and so on, reflecting the varieties of the domestic experience.

And the second challenge to understanding home is this: We have been building homes longer than we have been Homo sapiens.

* * *

For the last thirty years, I have been digging into people's homes. Working in the dry desert coast of Peru, I have excavated ancient houses built from river canes in A.D. 1400–1500 and uncovered a large work camp built circa A.D. 1350. I studied a small eighteenth-century native Chumash hut in Southern California built during the cultural penumbra between initial contact with Europeans and the full onslaught of Spanish colonialism. As a member of my wife's archaeological project in southern Mexico, I excavated the remnants of pole and thatch houses from the Colonial period and studied architecturally similar modern pole and thatch houses to understand the dynamics of construction and decay in the hot tropics. In Baja California, I have mapped open-air encampments and rock shelters of hunters and gatherers who occupied the peninsula from 4500 B.C. to A.D. 1800. In my recent expeditions in far northern Peru, I have excavated small elliptical pole and thatch houses that date to 4700–4300 B.C., large structures that probably housed extended families at 3500–3100 B.C., rectangular houses built from wattle and daub after 900–500 B.C., and the remnants of tabique houses occupied when the Inca Empire expanded into the region after A.D. 1470.

Although all my archaeological fieldwork has been in the Americas—Southern California, Baja California, southern Mexico, and Peru—these projects explored various prehistoric and historic cultures, occupying distinct environments, organized as diverse societies, and pursuing different livelihoods. The common element among them is that home was central to all these divergent lives.

I am endlessly intrigued by the prehistory of home. The creativity invested in dwellings is astounding. But beyond this, I must confess to a somewhat personal and what some might see as a less-than-scholarly interest in the prehistory of home: I deeply love my home.

My family and I live in a modest house in Long Beach, California. Long Beach is notable among Southern California beach communities for its lack of pretension. It is known as "Iowa by the Sea," in part because of the large number of Midwesterners who settled here in the decades flanking World War II, but also because of its lack of flash. It is a comfortable but unprepossessing community.

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."

The etymology of the English "home" untangles some of its strands of meaning. Home, from the Old English ham, has cognates in other Germanic languages: the Old Saxon hem, 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 kiemas and káima. These older versions of home imply distinct meanings and concepts. The Old English ham 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.

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. 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 ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), although apparently similar to the Latin domus, refers explicitly to the constructed house or building, and is derived from the verb demo ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) to build or construct. Distinct from the domos, the household was the oikos, a meaning retained in "economy" (the study of the law, nomos, of the household, oikos). The process of building a home for a household was oikodomein, a term that united those distinct meanings into a single process.

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.

(Continues...)Excerpted from The Prehistory of Home by Jerry D. Moore. Copyright © 2012 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.