Households and Communities

Abstract

The household is often seen as the basic unit of European Iron Age societies, but the role of the domestic sphere as a social arena has received relatively little attention. This chapter compares the nature and internal organization of household groups in selected Iron Age societies, examining not just the architectural layouts of houses and farmsteads, but also the residues of everyday practice. The dynamic nature of the relationship between household groups and the built spaces they inhabited is emphasized. Relations between households, and how they were integrated into wider communities, are also considered. In some societies, individual households were dispersed across the landscape, whereas in others they were clustered in large, nucleated ‘villages’. In many Iron Age societies, the local community—rather than larger ‘tribal’ groupings—was the primary level at which meaningful authority was articulated and negotiated.

Settling with the norm?

“…In addition to the long-term/large-scale perspective and lack of attention to variation, another factor that hampers our understanding of the social significance of variation in material culture is the functionalist approach that for a long time permeated settlement archaeology. In the past three decades, this has changed under the influence of publications from the Anglophone world with a more social and small-scale approach to domestic life (Wilk and Rathje, 1982;Hill, 1995;Brück, 1999Brück, , 2000Brück and Goodman, 1999;Webley, 2008Webley, , 2018. For the later prehistory of the Netherlands, the works of Gerritsen on the social biography of the house in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region have been especially influential for the theoretical developments in settlement archaeology (Gerritsen, 1999a(Gerritsen, , 1999b(Gerritsen, , 2003.…”

“…This question relates to the way members of a household make decisions when producing pottery, constructing houses, or discarding objects that are no 24 E.g. : Beaudry (2015); Brück and Goodman (1999); Madella et al (2013); Souvatzi (2012);Trigham (1991Trigham ( , 2001; Webley (2007bWebley ( , 2008Webley ( , 2018; Wilk and Rathje (1982). longer wanted.…”