T D S R V O L . I I I N O . 1 9 9 1 9 - 28

MEN AND WOMEN IN PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE

R U T H T R I N G H A M ILLUSTRATIONS BY CAT HER I NE e HAN G

Many aspects of the use and significance of space that are considered vital to the study of tra-

ditional architecture, such as gender relations in domestic space, have been minimized in the

treatments of architectural remains in archaeology. This paper examines the rationale for

restricting the facts of prehistoric architecture to building techniques and stylistic variability.

It then attempts to overcome these limitations byan experimental interpretation of prehistoric

architectural remains from Neolithic villages in Yugoslavia that addresses the social actions

of men and women in domestic space. The experiment involves a different standpoint on the

construction of knowledge about prehistory, the creative use of graphic representation, and

a critical examination of the archaeologist as mediator between past and present.

RUTH TRINGHAM is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. CATHERINE CHANG is a graduate of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

THE PREHISTO RY A ND A NCIENT HISTORY OF A RCHITECTURE

have been written on the basis of "facts" provided by archaeologists. Domestic architectural remains have been preserved in the archaeological record for many thousands of years. Their spatial distribution and stratigraphic sequence comprise, for many archaeologists, the main focus of their excavations and the most important aspect of the archaeological record. Those historians of architecture who have been interested in traditional architecture and who have used this prehistoric archaeological data have written histories that are arid, uncreative and dehumanized in comparison to histories of later architecture and in comparison to the analysis of modern traditional architecture.' They have limited their histories, for example, to tracing the origins of building technology' or to providing evidence for the origins and diffusion of certain archetypal foor plan forms.3

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Many of these limitations have been forced by the nature of the archaeological studies themselves , especially those that deal with the prehistoric period, in which the architectural remains are bereft of any supporting historical archival data. It is true that the poor preservation of most archaeological architecture is a severe limiting factor. The ground plan, foundation works, and, possibly, the lower part of the supersttucture are generally all that remain of a building on an archaeological site 4 These must form the basis for any reconstructions of the missing upper parts of the superstructure (including the roof).

I shall point out in this paper, however, that such limited use of the architectural remains is not an inevitable fate to which those who use prehistoric data must resign themselves, but rather a construct of archaeologists. The process by which archaeologists reconsttuct prehistoric buildings into the kinds of sttuctures that architects, architectural historians and anthropologists are used to visualizing in traditional contexts is a complex series of inferential steps. In practice, each of these steps is fraught with its own challenge of validation and the overriding problem of ambiguity. To ignore the ambiguity and to work within the illusion that the reconstruction is a "proven fact" is to claim that one's interpretation is knowledge rather than a "mode of transmitting knowledge."s

My aim in this paper is to encourage the critical examination of the sources of ambiguity in the recording and interpretation of archa�ological buildings. It will dare to provoke the reader into facing the ambiguities of archaeological data and actively participating in the process of envisaging past life. This will be done by presenting reconstructions of archaeological buildings in which some i nformation is hidden, in which the viewer is invited to use his or her imagination, and in which the viewer is invited to play with hypothetical alternative interpretations. Expanding on my previous work, I shall offer a more creative and humanistic way of looking at archaeological architecture than that available in the reigning dehumanized, normatized view 6

A DEHUMANIZED AND NORMATIZED VIEW OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

The dominant interests of traditional archaeology have focused on technological development, social evolution, and ecological adaptation. By "traditional" I refer to the work of American and European archaeologists, practicing both New (Modern) and not so New Archaeology. In one way or another studies by these researchers (whether they are concerned with architecture or not) proceed by extrapolation, the assumption of a normatized behavior for a whole population on the basis

of a well studied, but restricted sample. Architectural discussions in traditional archaeology have focused on building materials, construction techniques, and labor (in terms of manpower needed in construction);? on the adaptation of house construction to different ecological conditions;8 on activities within the building;9 on the form and style of the building in terms of its ground plan and two dimensional division of space;1O and on the structure and grammar of spatial distances between buildings and between different elements within buildings . >! If the people who inhabited or used a building appear at all in discussions of it, it is normally to make statements about demographic variability, that is, about the number of people who resided in the enclosed space based on its square footage and the use of general correlations between family structure and use of space. ' 2

Another characteristic of most traditional studies is their treatment of buildings as f nished artifacts. Recently, however, some studies have begun to take into account variables that might affect the preservation (or lack thereof) of architecture on archaeological sites and the implication this variability might have for the archaeological record. The idea here is that a building like a person has a life history during which its form and utilization can be modified, and eventually, the nature of these changes will affect the appearance of the building in its archaeological persona.')

Some recent studies have therefore theorized that expectations could be proposed and tested using available empirical archaeological data as to what would happen to a building during its use life: from its planning, construction, occupation and maintenance, through its decay, abandonment, destruction and eventual replacement. The aim of such enterprises is to be able to design "middle range research" that will provide a rigorous framework within the rules of scientific methodology for testing the validity of hypotheses about human behavior by observing archaeological (in this case, architectural) remains.'4 Test expectations about the modification of buildings have come from such sources as ethnographic (in particular ethnoarchaeological) observations'5 and actual experimentation with traditional building materials .'6

Surprisingly, however, these recent considerations of buildings as artifacts which have gone through various stages oflife, fnally encompassing dirt, decay and abandonment, have not led to a great change in the way archaeological architecture is interpreted and reconstructed textually or graphically. Neither has it led to an increase in the depiction of people in reconstructions. In this sense, archaeological architecture remains as dehumanized as ever. It is worth examining how and why this has happened.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL BASIS FOR SCIENTIFIC VALIDATION OF RECONSTRUCTIONS OF PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE

Three interrelated conditions exist which contribute to the continued passive and arid nature of the graphic and textual representation of archaeological architecture, and which will have to be changed before the writing of prehistory can be humanized: (l) the requirement of attributing the archaeological record to past behavior; (2) the dominance of interest in mac to scale questions; and (3) the consideration of material culture (architecture) as a passive ref ection of behavior.

According to the methodology of logical, positivist science (a dominant way of creating knowledge in Western society), it is the ability to assign the archaeological record directly or indirectly to behavior that enables the empirical testing of hypotheses about past human social and economic behavior. This theoretical and methodological framework is based on the supposition that material culture is a passive refection of society's behavior. According to this view, any action by which social behavior has modifed a material (i.e., architecture) can potentially be reconstructed given an analysis that is careful enough to extract the right information from the material.

The other side of this coin, however, is that any action that did not modify the archaeological record, or which cannot be identified as having modified it, cannot be reconstructed and is therefore not testable. Thus, many aspects of the use and signifcance of space that anthropologists and architects consider vital to the study of traditional architecture have consistently been ignored or minimized in the archaeological treatment of architectural remains. Among these aspects are social relations, especially those based on gender and age, and the social action of individuals within space. The rationale for the exclusion of these areas from study is that it is impossible to demonstrate conclusions about them with any scientific validity, since they are refected only very indirectly in the material culture. In other words, the archaeological data cannot be attributed to these actions, categories or relationships.

Attempts to attribute architectural units in the archaeological record to specif c social units, such as the "family" or "household, " or "male" or "female" spaces, have been countered by ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological cautionary tales that warn researchers of the dangers of such an approach.I? The result has been that topics such as prehistoric people and their variability at a micro scale (within the family or the household, or between men, women and children) have been regarded as untestable and have consequently been marginalized. IS

As can be seen from the list of topics covered by studies of archaeological architecture, "what has dominated the interest

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and energies of archaeologists in the (re)construction of prehistoric life has been what goes on beyond the household the corporate production of surplus goods, exchange and alliances on a regional and inter regional scale, the struggle of humans to control the environment, the hierarchies and dominance structures between settlements. "19 This has been the case even though most archaeological excavations of settlements retrieve data which is most pertinent to the study of households and the products of domestic labor (housework). At the macro scale, however, an archaeologist is more able to accept generalized assumptions about household action,20 despite the fact that these have been severely criticized as underestimations of the richness and variability of the social context of domestic action. 21 "Meanwhile prehistory which continues to use them is left hanging in a cloudy nowhereland of faceless, genderless categories . ""

GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE: THE ARCHAEOLOGIST AS MEDIATOR

The accepted strategies of graphic representation of architecture in traditional archaeology manifest the same characteristics of dehumanization mentioned at the beginning of the previous section. In textbooks on archaeological illustration, the "right" or "appropriate" way of illustrating excavated buildings emphasizes accuracy (of scale, for example) and clarity in the presentation of empirical archaeological data (i .e . , as much as possible is to be represented) in order to allow the possibility of using the illustrations even reconsttuctions as the basis of further research.2) Most projections in archaeological reports are orthographic (two dimensional). As for three dimensional representations, axonometric projections are preferred because they can show exterior and interior spaces, and because they emphasize the main source of empirical information, that is, the ground plan . 2 4

Jean Paul Bourdier has, however, pointed out in the context of comments on the nature of postmodernism in the study of traditional architecture that "representation plays a central role" as the "mode of transmitting knowledge."25 Expanding on this theme, I would say that the archaeologist, like the architect and anthropologist, can also act as a mediator, limiting or encouraging the reader to view, visualize and imagine the buildings of the past and their inhabitants. He or she can accomplish this through the medium of graphic representation.

It is by understanding and accepting this role as mediator that archaeologists may identify the sources of ambiguity present in the graphic illustrations that they use to record and interpret archaeological architecture. The primary condition

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here is that it is the archaeologist who selects what is to be represented and emphasized about a building's construction, whether concerning its exterior appearance or ground plan, and it is he or she who also determines how this will be represented. Thus, the archaeologist structures both his/her and the reader's experience of the building by choosing between graphic variables (e .g . , between a two dimensional or a threedimensional representation).,6

Choices made in the process of graphic representation ref ect much about the excavatorlinterpreter/(pre)hisrorian in addition to his/her basic knowledge about structures and building materials. For example, they refect the priority he/she gives to different questions: for example, what interests him/her, what kinds of questions he/she thinks others would ask about a building, and who he/she thinks would ask these questions (other archaeologists, architectural historians, museum visirors). They refect what he/she thinks of the power of archaeological data to validate ideas: for example, when he/she thinks it is appropriate and "legitimate" ro use speculation and imagination, and when it is not. They reflect his/her assumptions about the way space is lived in by people: whether space is a passive or active arena, and to what extent the things people do there relate ro how they interact with one another. And they reflect his/her underlying assumptions/philosophy about the past: about the role of the past in the present and future and about the lives of men, women and children in the past.

Critical examination of the archaeologist as an active mediator between the past and the present has only very recently become an issue in archaeological literature. 27 The power of graphic representation to ref ect and mediate (transmit knowledge), however, is something that has virtually never been

discussed in archaeology, even in its postmodern manifestation.'8 When so much archaeological literature has been devoted to the methods of architectural reconstruction by graphic representation, it is surprising that so little of this has been devoted ro "what has informed the drawing and what has inspired the drawing. "'9

The power of an archaeologist ro manipulate and mediate between past and present is expressed well by Bourdier's evaluation of the different representational methods available. As mentioned above, mainstream archaeologists favor axonometric projections in the reconstruction of buildings. Bourdier also favors axonometric projection over, for example, perspective views but for very different reasons. In Bourdier's opinion, perspective drawings encourage passive involvement by the viewer, which contrasts sharply wi th the challenge to both drawer and observer provided by the cutaway axonometric view.JO With the latter, the drawer has the power to

mitigate the overall crystal ball effect by determining where the drawer is positioned, how distortions from constructed perspective will be handled, and what will be hidden and what revealed 3' In this fashion, the drawer "[invites} the reader to imagine the experience of walking through several spaces with their offered and hidden views . . . . The active involvement of the reader is provoked not only by the unusual angle of view but also by the range of reading possibilities and itineraries suggested. The reader . . . must choose and make up a personal reading path. ")2

Within this framework of archaeologist as mediator, one must further ask how the aridity of present methods of showing prehistoric lives can be explained in the reconstructions of prehistoric structures. With one or two exceptions,33 there has been no discussion in archaeological literature of whether or not to include people in a reconstruction and if so, how and where to do so. When people are included in a drawing, they are generally added more for scale than for humanizing effect. 14 Is it that people are irrelevant or indemonstrable in prehistory?

Graphic representation and reconstruction are traditionally aimed at showing what the building looked like when f rst built or at the height of its occupation. Its modif cation, wear and tear, partial abandonment, and so on are usually avoided, as are things such as mud, grime, or people that might clutter up the pristine material object and detract from the vital information of material remains!

A HUMANIZED/ENGENDERED STUDY OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

If one does not wish to assume that buildings in the past were built and occupied by faceless "units of social co operation" which carried out housework comprising a universal pattern of devalued at home social action, and if one does not wish to assume that the roles and relations of men and women in domestic space have been more or less uniform over time, then where does one start? If one does not assume that the built environment looked the same to prehistoric eyes as it does to ours, should one attempt to visualize it through their eyes; and if so, how should one proceed? For prehistorians, at least, not even the historical context is a given entity; it must be created. If household activity, gender relations, and perception of space are also not given, then where does one start in the construction of a humanized prehistory? How can the study of archaeological architecture be humanized , and would such a "humanization" make a difference?

A similar question was recently asked with reference to the "engendering" of prehistory in genera[ l5 and to the "engen

dering" of the study of past architecture.l6 "Engendering" must be understood here as comprising a crucial dimension of the "humanizing" of the past. As Conkey and Gero point out, to engender the past does not mean to search for the material correlates of gender roles in the archaeological record.l7 In other words, it does not mean attributing the archaeological record to gender categories. The aim must rather be to produce a visibility of gender as a social force in the visualization of the human actors in and around reconstructed archaeological buildings.l8 But how is one to do this and still retain respectability within the academic mainstream of "scientifc archaeology I "

Answers to these dilemmas have been considered in some of the post processual or postmodern trends in archaeology, including those evident in recent archaeological srudies within the framework of feminist epistemological theory.l9 One answer proposed by these works lies in treating the material culture itself in this case, the archaeological record of architecture differently, so that "traditional" passiveref ective assumptions about the role of the past built environment are turned around into an "active" medium for and symbolic expression of, for example, tensions caused by gender relations and dominance structures 40 In fact, the built environment can thus be thought of as the context, or arena, of social action 4'

Another answer that has been proposed lies in a reevaluation of the epistemological basis for the creation of knowledge. This may allow us to avoid being required to attribute the archaeological record to function, gender, or "domestic unit" even before we can consider it within the context of gender relations or household tensions. This involves changing to a research strategy with a different standpoint on ambiguity and the scientifc method, one that has been elegantly described by a number of philosophers.42 An essential aspect of this strategy is the critical interplay of a variety of interpretations and readings of archaeological architectute, in what Conkey has referred to as a "dialectics of interpretations," where complexity goes well beyond the juxtaposition of alternative hypotheses and scenarios.4)

In this way, ethnoarchaeological studies and ethnographic observations of residential architecture may be used for more than cautionary tales about the limits of archaeological inference. They can be used to help formulate expectations in terms of variability in architectural remains that express and refect changes in the role, relations and actions of men and women in the household in prehistory. They allow the formulation of empirical hypotheses and/or "readings" of the archaeological record on architecture and associated debris in a rich variety of ways.44

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The graphic representation o f humanized/engendered social action in its architectural context is a more complex process than simply "adding men, women and children." What in a dehumanized presentation of archaeological architecture would involve only a straightforward presentation of the building materials, reconstructed in a simple series of foor plans, elevations, and possible metric and perspective projections (FIGS. 1 5), becomes in a humanized prehistory a highly complex series of graphic images to illustrate the perception of space by both archaeologist and prehistoric actor (FIGS. 8 10).

The images are made complex by several elements. For example, an individual's perception of space will change duting his/her lifetime according to changes in his/her age and power to negotiate, and according to changes in the overall context of social action. Moreover, according to Allan Pred's "Theory of Place," not only do occupants ofa building perceive its spaces differently during the coutse of their lives, but the building itself is a dynamic space with a use life and history. At any one time, Pred says, a "place" should incorporate the historical trajectories of not only the animate actors who meet there, but also its own identity as an inanimate arena of the social action 45 For this reason, an archaeologist may choose to represent the building at the moment of its construction, at some mid point of its occupancy when it is still relatively new, as it approaches the end of its life and dilapidation sets in, or after it has been abandoned and/or destroyed.

Moreover, the use of a multitude of views, with spaces hidden and revealed, allows the introduction of an additionally complicating element to this representational process, the active participation of the viewer in the construction of prehistory, as opposed to his/her status as a passive recipient of "knowledge. " Within such a framework, nothing can be taken for granted as to the content or method of graphic interpretation. There must be critical awareness of prehistory on the part of the constructor as well as critical awareness by the viewer of whether (and why) the archaeologist has chosen to make certain aspects of the past invisible.

For example, one can return to the question of why people have been left out of reconstructions of architectural history in traditional archaeology. The overt explanation is that people cannot be "proven" by means of the empirical evidence. But one might also suggest that, as mediator between past and present, the archaeologist him/herself refects many assumptions that may be held (albeit subconsciously) in the contemporary Western mind. One of these is that the rich variability of human relations in the domestic sphere is irrelevant to the course of human history. In this way, what men and women do in relation to domestic space their

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CLAY FURNITURE

POSTHOLE

negotiations for power, about housework, and where to put the garbage will not affect the way in which cultural rules are formed and transformed. It is further assumed that although the domestic sphere may be the source of most of our knowledge about prehistory and early history, it is only in the supra domestic world of public buildings that important political action took place, the domestic sphere being merely the passive background to the latter.

A few archaeologists have begun to explore ways in which some of these assumptions and sources of ambiguity about prehistoric architecture can be brought to the foreground and treated as a starting point for a more humanized prehistory.

OPOVO, YUGOSLAVIA: A CASE STUDY OF HUMANIZED PREHISTORY

To demonstrate the potential value in the consideration of

variability at a micro scale, two villages are considered here whose remains are part of the archaeological record excavated at the Neolithic sites of Divostin and Opovo in northeast Yugoslavia.46 These are two contrasting sites, in that Divostin represents a large village in the fertile, wooded, hilly area south of the Danube River, whereas Opovo is a small hamlet

in the less hospitable (for farmers) marshlands north of the Danube. Both villages belong ro the later part of the Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic Vinca culture (ca. 4400 4000 B.C.) .

We surmise (with a bit of poetic license), moreover, that they were occupied contemporaneously.

OSb BURNED CLAY RUBBLE

@ CERAMICS

These settlements, like all those of the Late Neolithic/Early Eneolithic ofSourheast Europe, are characterized by the burned remains of dwellings that were built on a framework of uprigh t wooden posts dug into the ground and had walls of planks, logs or wattling covered on one or both surfaces by a thick layer of clay daub. Their foors comprised a thick layer of clay which was frequently spread over a substructure of horizontal logs or planks. On the archaeological sites, the whole structure appears as a bright orange or red mass of burned, collapsed clay rubble in which the shadows of the wooden framework are impressed (FIG. 7). Postholes are visible beneath the f oors, and the fact that there are from one to three rows of internal posts indicates a gabled roof. The traditional floor plan indicates a rectangular detached house, ca. 6 meters wide, varying in length from 6 20 meters (FIGS. 1,3).

The architectural remains are well preserved because of fire, but they date f rmly to the prehistoric period and are fully subject to all the problems of validation and the challenges of reconstruction discussed earlier. Most importantly in this regard, the archaeological remains are separated by many thousands of years from any written sources, and it would be unwise to extrapolate backwards through the millennia from descri ptions of continental European architecture in the records of Classical Rome or Greece, or even in the Medieval period.

The "traditional" architectural reconstruction of Vinca culture houses, as expressed graphically in the archaeological literature by simple elevations and isometric projections, focuses, as might be expected, on how the houses were constructed and

58

FIG. I. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Neolithic site of

Divostin, Yugoslavia. Floor plan of House I4 (afer

Bogelanovic, I988, Plan VII). FIG. 2. (ABOVE) Neolithic site ofGpovo, Yugosla

via. Floor plan of House 2.

FIG. 3. (RIGHT) Neolithic site of Divostin, Yugo

slavia. Reconstructed elevation of House I7 (afer

Bogelanovic, I988, jig. 5.28)

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16 • T D S R 3.1

FIG. 4. (TOP) Neolithic site of Divostin, Yugosla

via. Reconstructed projection of House I7 (afer

Bogdanovic, I988, jig. p8).

FIG. 5. (BOTTOM) Neolithic site ofOpovo, Yugo

slavia. Reconstructed projection of House 5.

subdivided, and what artifacts and furnishings were found inside them (FIGS. 1 5),41 Variability in construction focuses on the foundations (diameter, depth and distribution of posts, presence/absence of bedding trenches, clay foundation layer, timber sub foor, clay covering of the floor, and the length of f oor area). The superstructure of the houses has been less subject to analysis until recently since the empirical data is harder to fnd . But it generally involves topics such as the use of different forms and size of timber elements for the frame (split logs, planks, wattling, etc. ) and the type of daub mixtures used (i .e . for inner and/or outer surfaces, from varying mixtures dung, chaff, sand, etc . ) . Discussion of the roof of prehistoric houses has been especially active when a clear pattern of postholes is present, as with the Neolithic Linear Pottery culture houses of Central Europe,.8 but this condition is rarely present in the Neolithic houses of Southeast Europe.

The traditional reconstruction and i nterpretation of Vincaculture architecture has been enhanced by detailed research we carried out at Opovo during 1983 89 . This provided information on variability of materials, labor requirements and expenditure in this type of building, external and internal elaboration of buildings, general spatial arrangement, expected use life of materials, attempts to prolong the use life of structures, re use of materials, and the nature of the fnal destruction and abandonment of the site. This comprises part of the design of middle range research at Opovo to investigate how various social processes might have been ref ected in buildings at different stages of their useful lives (FIG. 6).49

The site of Opovo presented some striking contrasts with what archaeologists had come to expect as the pattern of Late Neolithic Vinca culture along the Danube River and in the fertile agricultural valleys and hills to its south, as exemplif ed by Divostin. The houses at Opovo are at the low end of the

length range for Vinca culture houses. Our overall impression was that the houses at Opovo were also less well prepared and less long lived than the majority of Vinca culture houses, and that the households represented in them were shorter lived and/ or less well established than those in large villages such as Selevac, Gomolava, Divostin and Vinca in the primary agricultural regions of Southeast Europe at this time. 50 This impression was strengthened by associated features such as the relative lack of storage facil ities and vessels and the high percentage of wild animals among the faunal remains.

Traditionally, archaeologists would have had no problem explaining these differences by the fact that the "domestic" structures and the behavior of the occupants of the houses at Opovo represented an adaptive response to the special ecological conditions of this area, which is marshier and less

fertile than the forested region south of the Danube and in the Morava river basin.

We (the research team of the Opovo project) prefer ro interpret the situation at Opovo according to two other possible scenarios. One proposes that Opovo was a special purpose, shortterm, perhaps seasonal settlement oriented toward a limited range of activities, such as the extraction of certain raw materials. Alternatively, we suggest that Opovo was a more permanent "bud off' settlement from one of the larger Vinca culture villages south of the Danube (for example, Vinca itself), and consisted of a "junior" or "disenfranchised" household(s) moving onto agriculturally marginal land.

In both alternative models we would expect to see much of the exchange network and symbolic expression and elaboration of the Vinca culture settlements intact at Opovo, as indeed we do. What is changed is that the full complement of production activities (tool production, storage) is not present. In both models we would also expect the household to have a different form and activity than that evident in the well established, stable households of the aggregated villages to the south. According to the frst model, only a limited number of people would have occupied the settlement at any one time, possibly of one predominant gender or age group; consequently one would not expect the kind of cooperation in production, distribution and reproduction one might f nd in the larger sites. According to the second model, we would expect to see a fully developed, stable household organization with cooperation in production and distribution, but only at an initial stage of development and only with strong ties of alliance with the "homeland. "

To demonstrate how these general models o f socioeconomic change can be translated into the variability observed in the archaeological architecture, I will focus in this discussion on the interior spatial arrangement of the houses. The houses at Opovo contrasted to the Vinca culture houses south of the Danube by being shorter than average so that they were almost square (although their width is almost the same as elsewhere 5 . 5-6 meters).

The variable length of Vinca culture houses (6 30 meters) may be the result of a variable number of subdivisions or rooms. The Late Neolithic dwellings of Southeast Europe, including those of the Vinca culture at Divostin and Gomolava, are characterized by internal foor to ceiling walls that subdivide them into rooms. In the literature on the house forms of Neolithic Europe, there is still a lively debate as to how such internal subdivisions of dwellings should be interpreted Y The crux of the problem is whether the individual rooms

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housed separate social subdivisions o f the household, or whether each household was made up of a small nuclear unit with a complement of functionally specif c rooms (kitchen, storeroom, cow room, etc.) . The dwellings at Opovo were

unusual in having no internal divisions into rooms. In one house (FIG. 3) there was a low partition wall separating the oven and food preparation area from the rest of the dwelling. Another showed evidence of a second story P But internal, full height walls were absent.

Hunter Anderson has correlated the internal compartmentalization of rectangular space with the complexity of the dominance structure and the organization of activities and meanings within a building.53 Following this hypothesis, one can conclude that the short, one roomed Opovo buildings, with their lack of compartmentalization, may have been occupied by households whose activities and complexity were very different from those who occupied the large, multi roomed houses to the south. The following section will try to pry beneath this impersonal analysis to follow up the vast implications for social relations and social action embedded in this contrast in compartmentalization.

DIALECTICS OF INTERPRETATION: A GRAPHIC ESSAY

In our experiment at humanizing the graphic representation of archaeological architecture, we have attempted to express some aspects of living in prehistoric domestic space whose construction is based in the empirical details of the archaeological data. 54 The excavation and analysis of the architectural materials carried out at Divostin and Opovo and other Vincaculture sites provide material parameters as to how the houses were built, furnished and destroyed that go beyond superf cial appearance and association.

Our experiment is based on the premise that the same empirical data can be interpreted in various ways textually and graphically by different archaeologists holding different ideas, philosophies and priorities about what needs to be shown. These varying interpretations and images are not in competition as to which is more "accurate." Instead, the very plurality of their presentation, if each is done with enough critical selfawareness, ensures a healthy dialectic of interpretation. Alison Wylie suggests that archaeological data is not "infnitely plastic."55 Evidence will constrain the free f ow of the imagination, leading to certain constructions of the past that are more plausible than others. Thus, to ignore the material parameters ofarchitectural variability mentioned above would be to remove all plausibility from our humanized imaginings.

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But we need more than the excavated material record the floor plan of the house, the ovens, the ceramics, the figurines, the household debris. As aids to our creative imagination we have used comparative observations on space from ethnography and history for inspiration. 56 The result is graphic visualization that sometimes goes well beyond the boundaries of traditionally acceptable "scientific postulation."

In the original study I began at Gpovo in 1983 in contrast to that which is beginning to be practiced now the information on architectural variability would have been assumed to provide a passive ref ection of the actions and behavior of prehistoric households. The end product of the study would have been a comparison of the architectural and associated artifactual materials to test conclusions about the variable actions of households according to various scenarios. The ultimate aim of the research would have been to attribute certain archi tectural features and spatial patterns of associated materials to units of economic and social cooperation (i .e . , households). This would have provided a first and scientifically legitimate step in identifying and eventually reconstructing the transformation of households in prehistoric Gpovo. Now, however, this same information is being regarded as providing us (the archaeologists) and them (the prehistoric men and women) with the material contextof those actions and relations and tensions. It is being used as a starting point to construct a different kind of prehistory, one written at different scales of analysis and theorizing.

My entry into this endeavor in this paper comprises of two houses: House 14 from Divostin (FIGS. I, 8 , 9) and House 2

from Gpovo (FIGS. 2, 7, 10, II). I have outlined in the previous section their material parameters, what they have in common, and what contrasts they present. I have viewed the two houses at a macro scale of the Vinca culture and its context of the prehistory of Southeast Europe. I have also described Gpovo as an example of a village settled in marshlands within the plausible hypothesis of "budding off' from the large villages of the Danube valley and beyond in the later era of the Vinca culture. Now, I imagine what would happen ifI followed through this hypothesis by theorizing/imagining at the micro scale of a single household, using the parameters of a single house and visualizing through the eyes of a single participant in this process. Would this contribute to the expression of the social drama of prehistory?

I present in these illustrations a moment of engendered prehistory, a moment of social action. I will try to demonstrate that this allows and encourages us to go much further in our understanding of architectural variability in terms of the dominance relations and tensions between males and females,

between siblings, between neighbors, and between age groups as they move within and between the spaces that constitute what we call the built environment.

Let us assume in our graphic representations that the domestic spaces (inside and outside the dwellings) in prehistory as now were arenas for social action and, moreover, that the tensions between men and women were expressed through the medium of the material world. Spatial divisions physical boundaries such as walls or symbolic markers would mediate the access to different parts of house . 57 I invite the reader to assume further that men and women in Vinca culture houses did not feel equally "comfortable" in all parts of their domestic space. There is no proof that these conditions existed in the "reality" of the past, but I believe they 8.re useful starting points.

We have drawn the view of different spaces as we imagine they were perceived by different members of the household (FIGS. 8-10) . I have borrowed heavily from Bourdieu's analysis of "light" and "dark" areas of houses in designing these illustrations. 58

We invite you to fly through an axonometric view of the dwelling, House 14 at Divostin (a large village in the fertile low hills south of the Danube) to view the arena of social action (FIG. 8 C) . As an archaeologist, you are acting as the medium through which others must view these spaces. You seem to be able to see everything at once, as through a crystal ball. But your/our perception is limited to a view that is external to the social actors and action.

Now we invite you to come down from your God(dess) like space, to view different spaces in the house as we imagine they were really perceived by different members of the household. In one illustration (FIG. 9A) we imagine the "public" room of the house as viewed by an entertainee sitting there. The room seems bathed in light, and in his immediate view he can see a display of artifacts characterized by elaboration full of overt symbolism: female f gurines, fine pottery, an elaborate decorated oven, painted walls, and so on. These are objects that archaeologists are quick to assume have "great symbolic signifcance," but we suggest that they comprise an overt display that is designed to provide meaning about the house and its household for the outside world. Dimly, through a curtain the entertainee sees a dark inaccessible area of the house. He does not want to speculate what kind of social action goes on there.

We then (in our imagination) enter the eyes of the woman who spends much of her time in this dark mysterious room (FIG.

INTENSIFICATION OF

PRODUCTION

HOUSEHOLD

ORGANIZATION

OF PRODUCTION

HYPOTHESES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND

SOCIAL RELATIONS ASSOCIATED WITH

ARCHITECTURE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Themes that underly the endeavor are

located outside the circle

T R I N G H A M : P R E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E C T U R E · 1 9

SEDENTISM

THE DOMESTICATION OF HUMANS

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC

ORGANIZATION

FORMULATION AND TESTING OF EMPIRICAL (MIDDLE-RANGE)

HYPOTHESES ON PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE

Linking arguments to general theories

Quantitative evaluation and recording of

archaeological data on architecture

Identification of prehistoric behavior

__ Observations and experimentation

FIG. 6. ''Middle-range research " design to study archaeological architectural remains.

20 • T D 5 R 3.1

9B). The room is the farthest in the house from the entrance, and we imagine it to be more "private" and quite inaccessible to most people outside the inner circle of the household (especially adult males). At present it is f lled with other women and children. In contrast to the "public" room, none of its objects, nor any of its furniture or walls, is decorated or otherwise elaborated. Every object, however, is f lled with an associated story and with a heavy ritual signifcance vital for the continued social reproduction of the household. What for an outside observer (including an archaeologist) is a simple undecorated oven takes on great signifcance as the source of all the energy of birth, death, fortune and misfortune for the woman who sits next to it.,9

In fact, these assumptions could have been turned on their head, but I have chosen here to follow through the idea of the need for overt symbolism to deal with bounding the closed household from other households in this period of European prehistory.60

By showing the wider view of the house in the context of its landscape (FIG. 8-A), we remind ourselves that the social arena of domestic space is not restricted to the dwelling itself, but

includes the areas immediately outside, including the gar­bage pits,61 and the f elds, woods and marshes beyond. As we again lift ourselves off the ground, we look at the village of Divostin as a whole (FIG. 8 B), knowing that each of the many buildings whose outer shell we see houses a similar arena of social action. We imagine, for example, that the dark room ofDivostin House 14 has been entered by many women from other households as they pool their labor and carry out their network of communication.

In our landscape view of Divostin the clear natural subdivision of space by hills and valleys is obvious to us , even as modern archaeologists. As the seemingly more homogeneous marshland space of Opovo (FIG. 10) comes into view, however, we remind ourselves that our (archaeologists' ) perception misses much of the complexities with which the prehistoric inhab­itants must have perceived and divided up the landscape. But the perspective view of Opovo nevertheless helps us in our musings about the bud off scenario for Opovo. What happened when "the strong ties of alliance" were put into action) What did a woman sent from that room in House 14

at Divostin to seal an alliance with the "marginal" settlement of Opovo have to do, or choose to do?

Thus we switch scales once again and view a perspective drawing of the houses ofOpovo, with their lack of partitioning of space. The view is through the eyes of one of the few occupants of the village, a young girl who just a few moments ago we saw in the darkened room at Divostin. Here, she has come to her betrothed to take up her new position as his j unior wife. She will spend most of her adult life in this small hamlet in the marshes until she is released by his death and her last act in the hamlet, the burning of his house 61 In an axonometric drawing (FIG. II) we view the interior as an archaeologist, but as one informed and inspired by imagination, models, and archaeological context.

As we enter the eyes of the new occupant, she is still in shock at the unknowns and unexpecteds of her new spatial context. She is surprised by the small size of the houses, by the fact that there is no place for storing things and compartmentalizing activities. If her main working arena in Divostin was a dark room, then here the light that pervades the whole house appears as a great surprise and not necessarily a pleasant one, for here every action in the house is visible to everyone else. We surmise that in a small village like Opovo the opportunities for pooling oflabor and information were much more limited, especially for women. We imagine that women in Opovo would have worked alone or in very small groups. Little is familiar in the houses for the subject whose eyes we have entered, but some things remain the same, such as the form and proportions of the oven which we have already

II

II

II

T R I N G H A M : P R E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E e T U R E • 2 1

FIG. 7 . (OPPOSITE PAGE) Burned hottSe daub

ji-om the Neolithic site of Opovo, Yugoslavia

(photo: M. Trninic).

FIG. 8. (BELOW) Neolithic site of Divostin,

Yugoslavia Reconstructed views of a landscape:

A) the prehistoric village in the hills; B) reconstruc

tion view of the village; C) axonometric projection

of House I4 (drawing: C. Chang).

22 • T O 5 R 3 . 1

II

II

FIG. 9. (LEFT) Neolithic site of Divostin,

Yugoslavia. Reconstructed perspective views of

(A) northern room and (B) central room of House

I4 (drawing: C. Chang).

FIG. ro. (OPPOSITE PAGE) Neolithic site of

Opovo, Yugoslavia. Reconstructed perspective view

of the landscape and excavated part of the village

(drawing: C. Chang).

surmised plays an important role in all domestic social actions in these villages . We can imagine other shocks: the quiet at Opovo after the noise of a big village; the loneliness and isolation; the mosquitoes . . . .

A BROADENED VIEW

By carrying out this exercise in visualizing engendered space at Divostin and Opovo, I have not produced any "true" facts or pictures of prehistoric social actions in its architectural context. I have followed through an interpretation of the signif cant change in the archaeological pattern of settlements described at Opovo at the end of the Neolithic in Southeast Europe that is, the dispersal of settlement onto agriculturally marginal lands. I suggest that this change had considerable implications for labor access and resource procurement for a household as a whole. An interest in gender relations and social action at a micro scale further enabled me to broaden these implications to include a rapid decrease in the pooling oflabor between households and extra kin support, especially for the female members of households. And I have also followed through the social and symbolic implications of the contrast in the internal subdividing of a house between Opovo and Divostin.

In carrying out my experiment, however, I have dramatically expanded the scope in which the architectural context of prehistory (house, artifacts, furniture) can be used to construct a prehistory many prehistories' Artifacts, such as an undecorated hearth have become more potentially signif cant, rather than being forgotten in the depths of an archaeological report. The signifcance of a f gurine has acquired multiple possibilities, rather than being limited to one true interpreta

tion. The invisible arena of the most dramatic social actionhousework has taken on a more visible and important role. And a house, or a site, has become important in its own historical trajectory, rather than being seen only as a sample from which the whole is to be extrapolated.

An archaeologist has a choice of scale in which to consider the archaeological record. Usually we choose the scale of a normatized conglomerate of perceptions imagined for a group of people during a prolonged block of time. I have been arguing

that it is important to consider the scale of the social action of individual actors frozen at particular moments of their history. Whichever scale is selected, the archaeologist must be self consciously aware of his/her choice and treat it as a topic for discussion rather than as something to be concealed or mystif ed. There is no doubt that the spatial and chronological scales of context that I chose for this exercise could have been subjected to a more creative treatment than that which we have presented. For example, within the house we could have

T R I N G H A M : P R E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E e T U R E • 23

presented many different perceptions of the social actors. But the built environment will be perceived differently if one looks through the eyes of different prehistoric actors who are of different age, gender, power, and life history. An individual's perception of space will change during his/her lifetime according to his/her change in age and power to negotiate and according to changes in the overall context of social action.

It takes a great deal of effort and imaginative power to consider human beings in the past who engaged in social acts for many years and for many hours of each day with many other

people, who each had a history, and whose acts were carried out within the context of this history, of their gender, and of their age (generation). But we cannot deny that these social actors were an essential aspect of the archaeological architecture which we excavate and reconstruct. When historians and ethnographers consider social action, they consider a wealth of information on individual social action and life history that archaeologists have no access to. But it seems to me that

24 • T O S R 3 . 1

for archaeologists who wish to theorize at a micro scale and contribute a prehistory of engendered social action, the kind of dialectical interplay between material remains , comparative historical or ethnographic observation, and imagined social actors and actions attempted here is a legitimate method of expression. It is an incorporation of text and image play into scientif c enterprise.

FIG. I I . Neolithic site ofGpovo, Yugoslavia. Axonometric projection of House 2 (C Chang)

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T R I N G H A M : P R E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E e T U R E • 25

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Gould, ed. (Albuquerque: University of New

Mexico Ptess, 1978), PP.169 199; and "House­

hold Organization in Neolithic Yugoslavia."

15. Abrams, "Atchitectute and Enetgy"; E.K.

Agotsah, "Archaeological Implications of

Traditional House Consttuction among the

Nchumutu of Notthern Ghana," Current Anthropology 26.1 (1985), PP.J03-Il5; and

"Evaluating spatial behaviour patterns of

prehistoric societies," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 7 (988), PP.231 247; B . Cranstone,

"Environment and choice in dwelling and

settlement: an ethnographic survey," in Man, Settlement and Urbanism, Ucko, Ttingham and

Dimbleby, eds., PPA87 503; N. David, "The

Fulani Compound," World Archaeology 3.2 (1971);

L. Horne, "The Household in Space: dispersed

holdings in an Itanian village," in Archaeology of the Household, Wilk and Rathje, eds.,

pp. 677-686; and " Recycling an Iranian Village:

ethnoatchaeology in Baghestan," Archaeology

36.4 (1983), pp.16 20; Hunter-Anderson, "A

Theotetical Approach"; S . Kent, Analyzing

Activity Areas: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of

the Use of Space, (Albuquerque: University of

New Mexico Press, 1984); C Kramer,

"Ethnographic Households and Archaeological

Interpretation," in Archaeology of the

Household, Wilk and Rathje, eds., pp.663 676;

and Village Ethnoarchaeology: Rural Iran in

Archaeological Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1982); F.W. Lange and CR.

Rydbetg, "Abandonment and post-abandon­ment behavior at a rural Central American

house-site," American Antiquity 37.3 (1972),

PP.419 442; R. McIntosh, "Archaeology and

Mud Wall Decay in a West African Village," World Archaeology 6 (1974), PP. 154 171; and

"Square Hurs and Round Concepts," Atchaeol-

T R I N G H A M : P R E H I S T O R I C A R C H I T E e T U R E • 27

ogy 29.2 (1976), PP.92 10I; H. Moore, "The

interpretation of spatial patterning in settlement

tesidues," in Symbolic and Sttuctural Atchaeol­

ogy, I. Hodder, ed. (Cambtidge: CUP, 1982),

PP. 74 79; and Space, Text, and Gendet

(Cambtidge: Cambridge Univetsity Press, 1986);

N. Tobert, "Domestic Atchitecture and the

Occupant's Life Cycle: Sudan," in Ttaditional

Dwellings and Settlements Review 1.1 (1989),

PP.19 38; P .] . Watson, "Architectutal

differentiation in some Near Eastern communi­

ties, prehistoric and contemporary," Social

Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating,

C Redman, et aI . , eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1978), PP.131 158; and Atchaeological

Ethnography in Western Itan (Washington,

D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Viking Fund

Publications in Anthropology No. 57, 1979); and

R. Wilk, "Little House in the Jungle: the causes

of variation in house size among modern Kekchi

Maya," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

2 (1983), PP.99 II6.

16. A. Bankoff and F. Wintet, "A House­

burning in Serbia," Archaeology (September,

1979), pp 8 14; E. Callahan, Pumunkey Housebuilding: An Experimental Study of Late Woodland House Construction Technology in Powhatan Conftderacy (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univetsity, 1981); Coles, Archaeology by Experiment, R. McIntosh, "The excavation of

mud structures: an experiment from West

Aftica," World Archaeology 9.2 (1977), P.199;

Reynolds, "Substructure to Superstructure"; G.

Shaffer, "Attempts at maximizing anthropologi­

cal knowledge of prehistotic buildings," Antropologia Contemporanea 5. 1 2 (1982),

PP. 141 146; M. Stevanovic, "Construction and

Destruction of houses in the Vinca Cultute: an experimental archaeological investigation"

(M.A. thesis, University of Belgtade, 1985); and

"Middle-range analysis."

17. David, "The Fulani Compound"; L. Donley,

"House power: Swahili space and symbolic

markers," in Symbolic and StructuralArchaeol

ogy, Hodder, ed., pp.63-73; B. Hayden and A.

Cannon, "The cotporate gtoUp as an archaeologi­

cal unit," Journal of AnthropologicalArchaeology

1.2 (1982), PP.132 158; Horne, "The Household

in Space" ; Kramer, "Ethnographic Households ,"

and Village Ethnoarchaeology; Moote, "The

intetptetation of spatial patterning," and Space, Text, and Gender, Watson, "Atchitectural

differentiation," and Archaeological Ethnography in Western Iran. 18. Ttingham, "Households with Faces," P.98.

19 · Ibid, pp. 99 100.

20. Many of these assumptions are based on cross-cultural correlations between social

institutions and division of labor and levels of technology, such as hoe cultivationllwomen's

labor//covett male powet, or plough cultivationll

men's laborlloverr male powet, as suggested in,

for example, E. Boserup, Women s Role in Economic Development (London: George Allen

and Unwin, 1970); and Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction (Cambridge: CUP, 1976).

21. H. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: Univetsity of Minnesota Press,

1988), pp.21 24; and S. Yanagisako, "Family

and Household: the analysis of domestic

groups," Annual Reviews of Anthropology 8 (1979), pp. 161 205·

22. Tringham, " Households with Faces," p.101.

23. A recently published manual on the topic is

L. and R. Adkins, Archaeological Illustration (Cambridge: Cambtidge University Press, 1989).

24. Ibid , P.139 .

25· Bourdier, "Reading Tradition," PA2.

26. Ibid , PA3.

27. I. Hodder, Reading the Past (Cambridge:

cup, 1986); M. Shanks and C Tilley, Social Themy and Archaeology (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Ptess, 1987); and ReConstructing Archaeology (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987).

28. Even in Ian Hoddet's studies, in which the

traditional passive reflective role of material

culture (including architecture) has been turned

on its head and made into an "active" medium

fot and symbolic expression of social relations and actions, graphic representation has hatdly

been used. See, for example, I. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1991).

29· Bourdier, "Reading Ttadition," p. 51.

30. Ibid, pp. 46 48.

31. Ibid., p w

32· Ibid. , P· W 33. E . g . , A. Sottell, "The Artist and Reconstruc­tion," Current Archaeology 41 (1973), PP·I77 181.

34. E.g., M. Roaf, "The Hamtin Sites," in Fifty

Years of Mesopotamian Discovery, ]. Curtis, ed.

(London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq,

1982), PPAO 47, FIGS. 30, 32.

35. M.W. Conkey, "Does it make a difference) Feminist thinking and archaeologies of gender,"

in The Archaevlogy of Gender (Calgary: Chacmool Archaeological Association, in ptess);

and Gero and Conkey, eds., Engendering Archaeology. 36. Ttingham, " Households with Faces ."

37· M. Conkey and ]. Gero, "Tensions,

Pluralities, and Engendering Atchaeology: an

introduction to Women and Prehistory," in

EngenderingArchaeology, Gero and Conkey, eds.

PP· 3 30.

38. Tringham, "Households with Faces," P.Il7.

39. M.W. Conkey, "A teporr from the yeat

2050," Archeology Ganuary 1989), PP.35 82; I.

Hodder, " Postprocessual Archaeology," i n

Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory,

vol. 8, M . Schiffer, ed. (New York: Academic

28 • T D S R 3.'

Press, 1985), pp.I 26; Reading the Past, and "The

contextual analysis of symbolic meanings," in

The Archaeolo!!J' of Contextual Meanings, Hodder, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), pp.I IO; M.P. Leone, "Some Opinions About Recovering Mind," American Antiquity 47 (1982), PP.742 760; L. Patrik, "Is

there an atchaeological record)" in Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, vo1.8,

Schiffer, ed., PP. 27 62.

40. Hodder, Reading the Past, and Parrik, "Is

there an archaeological record )" 41. S. P . Blier, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontolo!!J' and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987); P. Boutdieu, "The Berber

House," in Rules and Meanings: The Anthropolo!!J' of Everyday Knowledge, M. Douglas, ed.

(Harmondsworrh: Penguin Books, 1973),

PP.98 IIO; Donley, "House power"; and "Life in

the Swahili rown house reveals the symbolic

meaning of spaces and artefact assemblages," The Afican Archaeological Review 5 (1987),

pp.181 192; M. Douglas, "Symbolic orders in the

use of domestic space," in Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, Ucko, Tringham and Dimbleby, eds.,

pp. 63 73; Hodder, Reading the Past, and

"Contextual Archaeology: an Interpretation of

Caral Huyuk and a Discussion of the Origins of

Agriculture," Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeolo!!J', University of London 24 (1987),

PP.43 56; and Moore, Space, Text, and Gender. 42. S. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Irhaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and "Introduction: is there a feminist

method )" in Feminism and Methodolo!!J': Social Science Issues, Harding, ed. (Bloomingron:

Indiana University Press, 1987), PP.I-14; E.F.

Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New

Haven: Yale Universiry Press, 1985); H .

Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and

Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton:

Princeron University Press, 1990); A. Wylie,

"Epistemological Issues Raised by a Structuralist

Archaeology," in Symbolic and Stntctural

Archaeolo!!J', Hodder, ed., PP.39-46; and

"Gender Theory and the Archaeological Record:

Why Is There No Archaeology of Gender)" in

Engendering Archaeolo!!J', Gero and Conkey, eds.,

PP 31 54·

43. M.W. Conkey, "Does it make a difference)"

44. Hodder, "The contextual analysis of

symbolic meanings"; and L. Therkorn, "The inter-relationships of materials and meanings:

some suggestions on housing concerns within

Iron Age Noord-Holland," in The Archaeolo!!J' of Contextual Meanings, Hodder, ed., pp. I02 IIO.

45. A. Pred, " Place as hisrorically contingent process: srructuration and the time-geography of

becoming places," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74.2 (1984), PP. 279 297.

46. The architectural research at Divostin is

reporred in M. Bogdanovic, "Architecture and

structural features at Divostin," in Divostin and the Neolithic of Central Serbia, A. McPherron

and D. Srejovic, eds. (Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh, Dept. of Anthropology, Ethnology

monographs 10, 1988), PP.35 142. The

architectural research at Opovo is reported in the

following: R. Tringham, B. Brukner and B .

Voytek, "The Opovo Projecr: a study o f socio­

economic change in the Balkan Neolithic,"

Journal of Field Archaeolo!!J' I2·4 (1985),

PP.425 444; R. Tringham, et aI., "The Opovo

Project: a study of socio-economic change in the

Balkan Neolithic. 2nd preliminary report,"

Journal ofFieldArchaeolo!!J' (in press); R .

Tringham, "Households with Faces. "

47. Benac, "Obre II"; Bogdanovic, "Architecture

and structural features at Divostin" ; B. Brukner,

"Naselje Vincanske Grupe na Gomolavi

(neolitski ranoeneolitski sloj)," Rad Vojvodjanskih Muzeja 26 (1980), PP.5-55; and "Die Siedlung der

Vinca-Gruppe auf Gomolava (Die Wohnschicht des Sparneolithikums und Fruhaneolithikums­

Gomolava Ia-b und Gomolava va Ib) und der

Wohnhorizont des aneolithischen Humus

(Gomolava II)," in Gomolava, N. Tasic and J .

Petrovic, eds., PP.19-38; Stalio, "Naselje i stan

neolitskog perioda"; J. Todorovic and A.

Cermanovic, Banjica. Naselje Vincanske Kulture, (Belgrade: 1961); and Tringham, et aI. , "The

Opovo Project."

48. Coudart, "Tradition, uniformity and

variability."

49. See note 15 for a bibliographic discussion on

"middle-range research" in archaeology. See also

R. Tringham and D. Krstic, "Introduction: the

Selevac Archaeological Project," in Selevac: a

Neolithic Village in Yugoslavia, R. Tringham and

D. Krstic, eds., (Los Angeles: Institute of

Archaeology Publications, UCLA, 1990), PP 9 II;

R. Tringham, "Architectural Investigation into

Household Organization in Neolithic

Yugoslavia," in 8}rdAnnual Meeting ofthe

American Anthropological Association; and

"Households with Faces."

50. Brukner, "Naselje Vincanske Grupe" and

"Die Siedlung der Vinca-Gruppe"; M.

Gara»anin, "Vinca und seine Stellung im

Neolithikum Sud-Europas, in " Vinca and its World, D. Srejovic and N. Tasic, eds. (Belgrade:

Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1990),

pp.II 15; Stalio, "Naselje i stan neolitskog

perioda"; N. Tasic, D. Srejovic, and B . Stojanovic, Vinca: Centre of the Neolithic Culture ofthe Danubian Region (Belgrade: Kulrura,

1990); and Tringham and Krstic, eds , Selevac: a prehistoric village in Yugoslavia. 51. Brukner, "Ein Beitrag zur Formierung der neolithischen und aneolithischen Siedlungen im

jugoslawischen Donaugebiet"; Coudart,

"Tradition, uniformity and variability";

Modderman, "Elsloo, a Neolithic farming

community in the Netherlands"; Soudsky,

"Etude de la maison Neolithique"; Soudsky and

Pavlu, "Linear Pottery Culture"; Stalio, "Naselje

i stan neolitskog perioda"; and Todorova, The Eneolithic Period 52. House 5 reported in Tringham, et aI. , "The

Opovo Project." 53. Hunter-Anderson, "A Theoretical

Approach." 54. In this last part of the paper, the "we" refers

not ro some kind of academic royal "we," but to

myself and Catherine Chang of the Deptartment

of Landscape Architecture, U.c. Berkeley, with

whom I collaborated in the creation of these

views of prehistoric space.

55. A. Wylie, "Matters and matters of interest,"

in Archaeological Approaches to Cultural Identity, Stephen Shennan, ed. (London: Unwin, Hyman

Ltd, 1989), PP.94 I09.

56. Bourdieu, "The Berber House"; Donley,

"House power" and "Life in the Swahili rown

house"; and Moore, Space, Text, and Gender. 57. Bourdieu, "The Berber House" ; Donley,

"House power" and "Life in the Swahili town

house"; and 1 . Hodder, "Burials, houses,

women and men in the European Neolithic,"

in Ideology, Power and Prehistory, D. Miller and

C. Tilley, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), PP.51 68; and The Domestication of Europe. 58. Bourdieu, "The Berber House."

59. I am grateful for this idea of the significance

of unelaborated symbolic artifacts in prehisroric

arrifactual assemblages ro Mirjana Stevanovic,

July 1990.

60. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe. 61. Moore, "The interpretation of spatial

patterning" and Space, Text, and Gender. 62. That srory may be read in Tringham,

"Households with Faces. "