In 10 chapters and an epilogue, this volume has three primary goals: to reframe dialogue concerning hunter-gatherer houses and their role in structuring cultural patterns and vice versa; to examine forager architecture through time, space and cultures; and to address the first two issues with a range of methods. Together, the chapters accomplish all these goals and more, making a strong case for questioning the assumptions archaeologists still tend to make concerning hunter-gatherers—namely, that investment in the landscape and architecture is more important to sedentary peoples. As the Epilogue points out, the distinction between mobile and sedentary groups is “not only false but misleading” (p. 269) and through the lens of houses this volume provides a better understanding of the diversity within hunter-gatherer populations.
While the concept of a built environment is broader, the chapters in this book focus on houses and/or domestic spaces, including how they were built and used, but also their more symbolic features. An important distinction is made in Chapter 7, between a house—the physical feature itself—and a household, which involves human agents and social organisations that do not necessarily equate with a specific structure. Overall, the volume documents sites ranging from hearths in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, to Upper Palaeolithic stone structures, Epipalaeolithic huts, late Stone Age semisubterranean houses, high-altitude structures, Palaeoindian camps, Thule houses, Maritime Archaic longhouses and contemporary lodges. Various chapters investigate the role that domestic spaces play in social memory (Chapters 4, 5 & 8), how they function to mark territory and/or maintain social identity (Chapters 2 & 8), their part in the wider landscape (Chapters 3 & 5), and how they are articulated with settlement and subsistence systems (Chapter 6). Theoretically, the chapters are diverse, incorporating practice theory (Chapter 4) to resilience theory (Chapter 8), human behavioural ecology (Chapter 6) and philosophical concepts (Epilogue).
Each chapter focuses on a specific case study, and these are arranged chronologically after the Chapter 1 introduction. Chapter 2, for example, focuses on differences between the living sites of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens to address where in our evolution a cultural mediated and symbolic construction of ‘home’ began; whereas Chapter 10 presents work with contemporary peoples. Chapter 2 adds additional criteria for recognising ‘homes’ in the archaeological record, including cultural norms which are repeated and symbolic place-marking. I agree with the authors that Neanderthals exist on a spectrum of behaviour, including homemaking, that we also exist on. As the chapters move chronologically through time, for example, discussing the persistence (or reliance) of Thule house manufacture, Chapter 8 outlines how systematic, shared templates of dwelling form maintained social identity in an ever-changing social and environmental landscape. Such shared design (with standardised, systematic elements) is central to the arguments made in Chapter 2 that distinguish human spaces from those of Neanderthals. These chapters, and others, argue that a mental template, or cultural ideal of a domestic space, is just as important as the physical space itself.
Other chapters present the nuts and bolts of detecting domestic structures in the archaeological record, and at sites with multiple houses, determining their contemporaneity. Methods discussed include spatial analysis (Chapters 7 & 10) and other inferential methods where there is an absence of clear stratigraphy and/or organic materials for radiometric dating (p. 142). While most chapters focus on a synchronic perspective, Chapter 10 focuses on understanding diachronic changes in domestic structures (in this case, from pithouses to longhouses in the Canadian Maritimes) and the potential causal factors in this change. This case study of variation serves as a good counterpoint to Chapter 9's Thule persistence, showing that houses can function as a key factor in both stasis and reorganisation in hunter-gatherer societies, and interestingly in both cases, resistance to external change.
Despite the title of the book, some chapters do comment on ‘biomechanical’ needs met by houses (p. 31), such as light, warmth and protection from the elements (Chapters 7 & 10). In the case of extreme environments (Chapter 6), these needs are pressing and shelter from the storm is critical, and, at least in the Arctic, often resulted in a more robust archaeological record (Chapters 5 & 8). In fact, most case studies in the volume are from cold, high-latitude or high-altitude places, representing this sampling bias. Notably, this record has made hunter-gatherers synonymous with houses in anthropological/archaeological inquiry in Arctic Norway (Chapter 5) a welcome departure from the standard views of foragers as only making temporary shelters. But, of course, in some environments and contexts, temporary shelters, or those that may be more ephemeral, are all that is needed.
Significantly, as the Epilogue states, places that may be ‘ephemeral’ to archaeologists were not necessarily ephemeral to those who made and lived in them. Chapter 4 goes further to demonstrate that “Ephemeral places have complex and multifaceted life histories” (p. 59)—the same can be said for mobile peoples: they have complex and multifaceted lifeways, despite an occasional lack of robust, permanent structures. Such places have long been entangled with ideas of the Neolithic Revolution and been seen as a hallmark of civilisation (p. 42), and a long-standing emphasis on mobility in hunter-gatherer studies has served to deemphasise the built environment (p. 4). Therefore, from both within and outside of hunter-gatherer studies, the built environment has been downplayed, long deemed to be essential to what foragers are not: permanent, invested, complex occupants of certain places. This volume effectively problematises these long-held assumptions and, instead, shows us that foragers’ homes were used for place-marking (reminiscent of early cemeteries establishing territory), structuring the landscape, reifying social memory, blurring the lines between domestic and ritual space, and can be investigated archaeologically.
The Epilogue states that the real strength of the volume is its use of comparison (p. 265), and I agree. I would also add that this volume fits within a growing collection of works that aim to document hunter-gatherers for what they are, not what we would make them, and reveals how complex not just their homes, but also their social lives were.
