THREE - THE INHABITED WORLD

Summary

I recently had the experience of acting as host to Indonesian hill tribesmen visiting England. They came from a people long regarded as economically “irrational” in that they sink much of their wealth in buffalo that are then slaughtered in large numbers at their funerals. They, however, found the English staggeringly irrational in the amount of money, proportion of income and amount of effort that they devote to owning their own home. Why, they asked, should anyone spend so much on owning a home he could never be in because he had to go out to work to pay for it?

Nigel Barley, Native Land. (Barley 1990, p. 51)

Houses are more than shelter; they embody cultural values, commitment to places, and plans of action. Few things bring home the difference of another culture more strongly than how they inhabit their houses. Houses and villages are a fundamental aspect of culture, both for us and for Neolithic people. One illustration of this is a remarkable pattern found throughout Southern Italy and Sicily. Archaeologists excavating an Early or Middle Neolithic village come across burials dating to much later in the Neolithic – perhaps 500 years or more. One of the best-documented cases, thanks to systematic radiocarbon dating, is Serra Cicora in the Salentino peninsula of Puglia (Ingravallo 2001; Quarta et al. 2005). Here people inhabited a small village in the mid-sixth millennium BCcal, leaving the usual debris as well as burying several of their dead within the village.