This paper responds to questions posed by archaeologists and engineers in the humanitarian sector about relationships between shelter, disasters and resilience. Enabled by an increase in horizontal excavations combined with high-resolution settlement data from excavations in the Dominican Republic, the paper presents a synthesis of Caribbean house data spanning a millennium (1400 BP- 450 BP). An analysis of architectural traits identify the house as an institution that constitutes and catalyses change in an emergent and resilient pathway. The “Caribbean architectural mode” emerged in a period of demographic expansion and cultural transition, was geographically widespread, different from earlier and mainland traditions and endured the hazards of island and coastal ecologies. We use archaeological analysis at the house level to consider the historical, ecological and regional dimensions of resilience in humanitarian action

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This paper explores the role played by water infrastructure in urban livelihoods. It is based on a study of three settlements in Cusco, Peru, and shows that different modes of organising infrastructure co-exist within the same city, despite national policy prescriptions for urban water provision. Further, unequal access of households to these services exists within the same settlements and amplifies household vulnerability which, in turn, feeds back to undermine local, autonomous governance of water. This paper draws on the work of van Vliet et al. and Marvin and Graham to develop a framework that considers infrastructure organisation alongside household livelihoods in order to analyse the features of governance and vulnerability that affect urban livelihoods by privileging some groups and bypassing others.