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In chapter 1, Beaudry explores how household archaeology has grown into a vibrant area of archaeological research and provides an overview of the history of household archaeology, its major themes, theoretical approaches, and emerging trends. More than the study of architecture, household archaeology provides an avenue through which scholars may address issues of gender, power, and inequality in different societies. Beaudry points out that these themes can be addressed by employing practice theory to investigate the object worlds that households create, the material habitus that develops within particular households, and the ways in which objects in those worlds affect household members’ identity and self-presentation within and beyond the household. Beaudry suggests that archaeological theory focusing on refuse and midden analysis is key for comprehending the emotional taphonomy of discard and its relationship to episodes of household upheaval. She sees the case studies in this volume as contributions to a historical archaeology of households that affords insight into the ways that individual households are enmeshed in wider social issues and processes.

In this chapter, Cobb poses the question of what more we have to learn from the study of households given the long history of archaeological thought concerning what such a study is or is not. He addresses the broader issues of this volume by selecting several reoccurring themes as a way to answer this question. Cobb unpacks these themes while examining how each chapter successfully addresses them and advances the field while engaging with the work of other archaeologists and archaeological theorists who came before. He finds that the studies in this volume emphasize the blurry boundaries between the household and the larger fields in which it is enmeshed and that the volume’s authors impel us to think about household-scapes in wide terms that include the experiential dimensions of modernity as well as its political and economic facets.

Chapter 3 explores how archaeologists through the study of the materials and spaces of everyday life have furthered broader discussions of everyday life. It examines the intersecting dimensions of household, space, gender, and historical archaeology research in archaeology. Household archaeology draws attention to how past peoples organized and made meaningful their domestic spaces. Space, place, and landscape research expands this agenda to understand how all living spaces are meaningfully constructed and experienced by people across their daily lives. Feminist and gender archaeology have drawn explicit attention to the importance of incorporating all social groups into archaeological analyses--not just different genders, but different class, ethnic, and age groups. By studying the material remains of past societies that also produce historical records, historic archaeology draws particular attention to the material dimensions of past everyday life.

This chapter summarizes the goal the book: to advance archaeological understanding of the domestic built environment in prehistoric societies by applying new empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to ancient Andean houses. Multidimensional approaches to are used to explore three broad spheres of human engagements with houses—how dwellings are made, how dwellings are inhabited, and how household archaeology has studied dwellings. Rather than a linear formula or singular methodological approach, this involves a process of intellectual triangulation in which different sets of questions are explored with distinct methods and bodies of data that intersect in the houses of the ancient Andes. This process of triangulation is signaled by the subtitle of this book.

This chapter provides anecdotes, historical and personal, surrounding ‘Ōpūnohu Bay on Mo‘orea, second largest of the Society Islands. It briefly discusses the intertwined history of the ‘Ōpūnohu Valley, the Kellum family, and archaeology, before turning to the more current prospect of studying Polynesian household archaeology and the settlement landscape of the ‘Ōpūnohu Valley. Like Hawai‘i, the Society Islands had one of the most complex, hierarchical social and political systems in Polynesia—which, among other reasons, confers the area with great potential for archaeological study. The multiple fieldwork sessions in this location had several goals: to investigate the concept of the “house society,” to explore the residential landscapes and community organization in the ‘Ōpūnohu Valley during the last century or two prior to European contact, and so on.

This chapter discusses excavations of household sites across Kahikinui. Nineteen kauhale (which translates “group of houses”) clusters were studied, most of which date to the pre-contact period, before European arrival in the islands. These house sites have opened a window on the world of the makaʻāinana (common folk) who made that windy land their home. It has revealed something of how they went about their daily routines; how they structured their lives in their humble kauhale; the menfolk offering prayers to the ʻaumakua (ancestors); men and women cooking their sweet potatoes in separate imu (earth ovens), yet eating together in the hale noa (wife and children), even as they roasted fish and other foods in separate hearths.

This chapter traces the local historical trajectory across the conquest through close-in archaeological investigation of the local experience of the earliest era of Spanish colonialism in early Catholic doctrinal settlements in the Colca Valley, one of the earliest locales of Franciscan missionization in the Peruvian highlands. After reviewing the documentary history of the Franciscan mission to the Colca Valley, the chapter presents settlement pattern data that show how friars established doctrinal settlements (doctrinas) at former nodes of Inka imperial administration, often recycling former Inka public and ceremonial architecture and spaces. Analysis then moves in to the best-preserved of these doctrinas—Malata—to investigate how daily and ritual life was transformed during this earliest wave of evangelization. Excavation data from colonial-era households reveal distinct production and consumption practices among the inhabitants of the doctrina, including probable identification of the friary and household of the indigenous lord (kuraka). Spatial network analysis is used to simulate foot traffic from houses to the Inkaic and colonial plazas at the site, showing how traffic was specifically rerouted away from the Inkaic plaza and toward the colonial plaza (and chapel beyond), thus isolating the former ceremonial focus and old residential core of the site.