During the Late Neolithic, a series of short-lived, monumental-scale farmhouses were constructed across southern Scandinavia. The size of these structures is often taken as a tangible manifestation of the elite status of the inhabitants. Here, the author explores the architecture and associated material culture of the six largest known examples, drawing attention to general parallels with smaller farmhouses in the region. The comparison highlights similarities in spatial organisation and function indicating that, despite their size, these monumental houses served the same roles as dwellings and centres of agricultural production. Attention to function rather than size emphasises the importance of food production and control of surpluses in the emergence of social elites at the end of the Neolithic.

This article presents a new interpretation of the results of the 1980s excavations led by Andrea Carandini on the north Palatine slope. In contrast to Carandini's original reconstruction of the complex as four atrium houses, I propose one palatial complex on the Sacra Via that finds some parallels in recently excavated complexes elsewhere, like the Auditorium site in Rome and the Borgo at San Giovenale.

Architectural remains, especially domestic architecture, are essential for understanding the ways in which households organized themselves socially and economically in the past. Unfortunately, these remains are infrequently identified from Woodland period (1000 BC–AD 1000) archaeological sites along the Gulf Coast, an area home to well-known ceramic and mortuary traditions during this time. As a result, our knowledge of Woodland period households in the region is scant. In this article I present a newly discovered house from Letchworth (8JE337), a large Woodland period ceremonial center in northwest Florida, and compare it to the few published examples of houses from this region. I show that domestic architecture along the Gulf Coast during the Woodland period is diverse, suggesting differences in the organization of households and the historical development of ceremonial centers.

A multi-disciplinary research project in the Aras Valley, Armenia, focuses on the remains of the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age settlement of Metsamor. The results challenge prior understandings of the settlement's past and the role it played in the region, especially during the first centuries of the first millennium BC.

This article argues that the notion of cultural biography presents a key to understanding the social and cultural practices that created archaeological records of domestic architecture, as it brings the close and dynamic relationships between a house and its inhabitants to the fore. To do so it presents a case study of the construction, habitation and abandonment cycles of late prehistoric farmsteads in the southern Netherlands. After discussing typical biographies of farmhouses and the way these are affected by a transformation from a ‘wandering’ to a stable settlement pattern, the perspective is broadened through a comparison with burial practices. These witness a roughly contemporaneous shift from monumental and communal to short-lived and dispersed cemeteries. Finally, it is suggested that we view these contrasting patterns in terms of a transformation of the perception of farmsteads as places in the landscape and land tenure practices.