Session: #505

Content:

A household is not just a space, nor a family, nor a house and not even just a domestic place, and, nonetheless relationships exist among all of these spaces, people, and things that might be included in what a household is. Households among other things are sites of conflict and struggle, emphasizing class, ethnicity, race or gender. Wilk and Rathje said that “archaeologists do not dig up households. They dig up dwellings and domestic artefacts but not social units” (1982), thus it is up to archaeologists to reconstruct the different social dimensions of those units. Households, as a multidimensional relational system of networks delimited by space, can be deconstructed into narratives and discourses, landscapes – be they mental or physical – and materiality. Its thread also has the potential for an intersectional analysis, weaving together inequalities, class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality.
We welcome papers approaching places with the traditional view of households such as conventional families' domestic places, but also from corporate households such as brothels, prisons, asylums, hotels, refugee camps, hospitals, monasteries, barracks, from Prehistory until five minutes ago. Archaeology as a discipline that is grounded in the present also has the potential to become a politically engaged science, and, thus, papers that envision households as sources of contemporary debates will be strongly appreciated, together with papers engaging with the concept and potential household definition.

Session: #505

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