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Transformations in the Art of Dwelling: some Anthropological Reflections on Neolithic Houses

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Tracking the Neolithic House in Europe

Part of the book series: One World Archaeology ((WORLDARCH))

Abstract

This chapter, by a social anthropologist, seeks to engage with the others in order to offer an anthropological perspective on the debates they raise about Neolithic practices of dwelling. The reader must surely have noted that many of the authors already paid close attention to contemporary ethnography in their search for ideas that can help to add nuance to the archaeological analysis of past societies. This chapter represents a small addition to the ongoing interchange between these two disciplines. The author has a particular research interest in the vernacular architectures of Indonesia, where longhouses also have a special place. She draws upon her fieldwork experience, as well as the archaeological literature on the Austronesian expansion into island Southeast Asia, in search of illuminating parallels regarding aspects of dwelling such as kinship, rituals, the political uses of architecture and the role of the house in social memory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Waterson 1995a, 1997, 2003, 2010.

  2. 2.

    On Borneo longhouses, see Freeman (1970); Rousseau (1990); Winzeler (1998, 2004); Sather (1993, 2001); and Cramb (2007). Some comparative discussion is also found in Waterson (1990).

  3. 3.

    See for instance Skinner et al. 1998; Chamberlayne et al. 2000; Waterson 2007.

  4. 4.

    On the Ju/’hoansi, see also Lee (2001).

  5. 5.

    One might add the vital role they play in articulating kinship and political relations, since in this matrilineal society, it is the duty of men to present yams to their married sisters. Since chiefs in Trobriand society are the only ones who are permitted to be polygynous, they have more brothers-in-law who must present yams to them. They can convert this into political capital by the public display of yams, followed by their generous redistribution.

  6. 6.

    Freeman 1970; Geoffrey Benjamin, personal communication.

  7. 7.

    A word for ‘chicken’ is reconstructable for PMP, but not for PAn, indicating that this was an addition to the repertoire only after the initial movement out of Taiwan (Bellwood 2011, S367).

  8. 8.

    A vivid sense of how permanence can be achieved through repetition can be found in Labelle Prussin’s account of Rendille pastoralists in East Africa. A Rendille elder’s account of nomadic movements over a 71 year period (1903–1974) produced a route map covering an area of over a 100,000 square miles with journeys amounting to 12,000 miles, during which his family camp with its tents had been pitched, struck, loaded, and unloaded almost twelve hundred times (Prussin 1995, p. 39).

  9. 9.

    This historical development has been carefully documented by Kis-Jovak et al. (1988) through comparative study of surviving houses of different ages.

  10. 10.

    In his discussion of the similarly competitive development of the Maori meeting-house from the 1870s to the 1930s, Gell (1988, p. 258) points out how house-building, as a political gesture, and the house itself as object, carry the traces of both ‘a movement of memory reaching down into the past and a movement of aspiration, probing towards an unrealized, and perhaps unrealizable futurity’. Actual houses must have been limited by the resources available at a time when Maori communities were already dispossessed and impoverished; hence, the ultimate meeting-house was something that could only be imagined. For Neolithic communities, what could effectively be realized may have had more to do with the limitations of available tool kits and technologies.

  11. 11.

    See Fox (1985) on how fairly minor modifications to a basic set of proto-Austronesian kin terms could have generated a whole range of regional variations in kinship systems. This ‘generative’ argument can be extended to the regional distribution of features such as horned gable finials and extended roof ridges (Waterson 1990).

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  1. Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, 11 Arts Link, 117570, Singapore, Rep. of Singapore

    Roxana Waterson

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  1. Roxana Waterson
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  1. , School of History, Archaeology,, Cardiff University, Colum Road, Cardiff, CF10 3EU, United Kingdom

    Daniela Hofmann

  2. , School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Cantock's Close, Bristol, BS8 1TS, United Kingdom

    Jessica Smyth

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Waterson, R. (2013). Transformations in the Art of Dwelling: some Anthropological Reflections on Neolithic Houses. In: Hofmann, D., Smyth, J. (eds) Tracking the Neolithic House in Europe. One World Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5289-8_17

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