No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households

Product Description

No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households had its genesis in a series of six popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. A selection of papers are presented here, together with four invited contributions. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections. Chapters in the first, Architecture as Archive of Social Space, profile houses as records of the lives of inhabitants, changing and adapting with residents; many offer a background focus on how human behavior is shaped by the walls of one's own home. This section also includes innovative approaches to understanding who dwelled in these homes. For instances, one chapter explores evidence for children in a house, another surveys what it was like to live in a military barracks. The middle section, The Active Household, focuses on the evidence for how residents carried out household activities including work and food preparation. Chapters include the 'heart of household archaeology' in their application of activity area research, but also drill down to the social significance of what residents were doing or eating, and where such actions were taking place. The final section, Ritual Space at Home, features studies on the house as ritual space. The entire complement of chapters provides the latest research on houses and households spanning the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods and from Turkey to Egypt.

About the Author

Laura Battini is a researcher specialising in Mesopotamia (II-I millennia BC), currently at the French National Centre of Scienfic Research. Laura created a new journal for the Ancient Near East (Ash sharq, Archaeopress), and is the editor of the series Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology. Aaron Brody is the Robert and Kathryn Riddell Professor of Bible and Archaeology and Director of the Bade Museum at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. His research interests include archaeology of the southern Levant, religion, society, economy, identity and ethnicity, postcolonialism, and maritime and deepwater archaeology. Sharon R. Steadman is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. She codirects the archaeological excavations at Cadir Hoyuk and also serves as field director. Her research focuses on domestic architecture and spatial analysis in prehistoric settlements.