Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Stella Souvatzi’s essay discusses recent work in archaeology on households. As Souvatzi argues, the spatial and temporal focus in archaeology has run increasingly in the direction of the micro. Less concerned with grand evolutionary sequences, processural and post-processural archaeology has more often concerned itself with small social units and has become more cognizant of the limited time frames in which sites may have been occupied: for instance, a mere half century in the case of northern Plains earthlodges. Mobility—either in the short term or long term—does not of course undermine the notion of household, or its usefulness in focusing attention on themes such as materiality, memory, and idealized models of perduring domestic units. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the house society has been influential on archaeologists’ understanding of households. Originally a way of dealing with the seeming paradox that Northwest Coast societies looked very much like corporate groups such as one expected in lineage societies, when only a few of the groups in fact possessed unilineal systems of kinship and descent, this concept was seminal in that it focused our attention away from the biological dimensions of social organization and onto the ideological ones. Household and family groups are of course always in a state of flux, due to the reality of demographic change, including birth, marriage, and death, as well as spatial mobility. In Northwest Coast societies, key symbols such as family crests, names, and stories were deployed to maintain the fiction of a permanent, indeed eternal, structure. This is nicely symbolized by an example of ‘‘mobile homes’’ found among many of the central coast groups. Houses consisted of two components: the permanent posts which remained in the ground for as long as the house was occupied, and planks, which could be removed and towed behind canoes during seasonal migrations. The posts were usually marked with the family’s crest, and so constituted, along with the accompanying title name and narrative, a permanent claim to house and property (symbolic property as well as land and resource rights). The planks—like the individuals who made up the group—were mobile. Another interesting point raised in this literature is the multigenerational project of building, adapting, and remembering the household. Again, this works at both the material and ideological levels. A structure may be built Reviews in Anthropology, 43:235–237, 2014 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.966642