Preface

The idea for this volume originated over a decade ago, in 1999–2000, when John Douglass was finishing a year as a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. During that time, he organized a session for the 66th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in New Orleans that was centered on Wilk and Netting’s (1984) innovative work on how households are conceived, using the phrase they coined “what households ‘do.’ ” Hence, the title of the SAA symposium was What Households Do: Recent Research on Household Organization in the Americas. As a fresh Ph.D., Douglass was interested in the household research that had been conducted by Nan Gonlin in Copán, Honduras, just a couple of hundred miles from where Douglass had done his dissertation work in the Naco Valley of northwestern Honduras. Douglass and Gonlin met for the first time in San Francisco at the American Anthropological Association meetings, before the household session had occurred. Over lunch, Douglass and Gonlin agreed to co-chair the session at the upcoming SAA meeting and to move forward with a volume on the topic if participants agreed.

The presentations at the 2001 SAA session in New Orleans were well received thanks to the thought-provoking work of our colleagues. The room was packed with archaeologists interested in the cross-cultural comparisons on the economic aspects of household organization. Soon after the session, a prospectus for an edited volume was forwarded to the director of the University Press of Colorado (UPC), Darrin Pratt, who encouraged us to pursue a publication with his press. Several members of the original session, including Jeanne Arnold, Sue Kent, Tom Killion, Anna Noah, Linda Neff, Cameron Smith, and K. Anne Pyburn, were not able to be a part of the subsequent volume for a variety of reasons, but we appreciate their important contributions to the original SAA session. Several members who were not in the original session were subsequently invited to participate in this volume, including Chris Beaule, Richard Ciolek-Torrello, Robby Heckman, Hope Henderson, Víctor González Fernández, and Dean Snow. We appreciate these authors contributing important case studies to this volume from across the Americas and helping round out the volume geographically. Time in preparing the volume has been lengthy for a number of reasons (serious family illnesses, changing jobs, moving, and a variety of other aspects of household life), and we appreciate the patience and understanding of the volume’s contributors and UPC, who have stuck with us through the process. Douglass and Gonlin have enjoyed getting to know the contributors and their research, as well as each other. Over the past few years, we have exchanged a series of funny postcards from various vacations. Working together has also led to other research collaborations, each of which we have enjoyed.

We hope that readers of this volume enjoy learning more about household economic organization among a variety of cultures across the Americas, both past and present.

JOHN DOUGLASS, TUCSON, AZ
NAN GONLIN, BELLEVUE, WA
APRIL 2012