Federico Buccellati 2014a

“Understanding Households – A Few Thoughts,”
in F. Buccellati, T. Helms and A. Tamm (eds.), Houses and Households in ancient Mesopotamia, Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 35-42.

“Clearly the multivariate role that a house plays in society is very difficult, if not impossible, to identify from the archaeological context, and yet many attempts have been made, with quite a bit of success” (p. 35).

The understanding of the ancient concept and reality of household is for sure a tricky point in the archaeological thought. Because archaeologists deal with a ‘broken tradition’ [for this topic, see G. Buccellati, CAR, Broken tradition], the reconstruction of the ancient meaning of a fact or of an archaeological entity is a slippery floor.

Nevertheless, the author proposes in this contribution some useful multidisciplinary approaches, such as ‘ethnographic analogy’, ‘ethnoarchaeological comparison’ and ‘landscape archaeology’. In detail, the author presents the specimen of the ‘Fortress of Elephant Hunter’ (in Burkina Faso): of this structure, F. Buccellati discusses the construction practices, the building phases, the function and context and (more generically) the rooftops, the gardens and farmland, the graves and the altars connected the aforementioned building.
     A topic introduced in the paper also deals with the relationship between urban and rural spaces [for which see Liverani, M. Reconstructing the Rural Landscape of the Ancient Near East, “JESHO” 39/1 (1996), pp. 1-41 (JSTOR)], a thematic very important also in studying ancient Urkesh’s landscape and society.

In the conclusions, the author stresses how the Burkina Faso’s example “presents archaeologists with an interesting study of the relationships between people and material culture” and how “the analysis of the Fortress presents a series of detailed case studies into the relationship between people and objects which can aid archaeologists in forming their own hypotheses regarding material coming from the archaeological record” (p. 41).