Materiality: House and Household

Household archaeology requires simultaneous attention to the physical remains of residential structures (viz. houses) and the material remains of the people who lived, worked, and visited with and around the structure (Ames 1996; Blanton 1994; Haviland 1985; Hirth 1993; Netting 1982; Netting et al. 1984; Wilk and Rathje 1982). An early, useful definition endures in Andean archaeology. This definition is entirely focused on materiality; it defines the household as “the smallest architectural and artifactual assemblage repeated across a settlement” subject to site formation processes during habitation, abandonment, and afterward (LaMotta and Schiffer 1999; Stanish 1989, 11). This archaeological definition focuses on the materiality both of houses themselves as well as the physical remains of people and activities that took place within them. Moreover, this definition emphasizes the fundamental nature of households to their wider social contexts. Attention to both container and contained is an essential and enduring characteristic of household archaeology (Hendon 2010).

A focus on the materiality of houses can help drive clear, local material indicators. For example, an elemental pattern based strictly on materiality is found among urban Moche houses—defined by multipurpose rooms with benches as well as access to essential areas, including storage (Bawden1977, 1978, 1982; Brennan 1982; Chapdelaine 2009; Lockard 2005, 2009; Shimada 1994). Additional architectural indices of social meaning can also be defined by focusing on the materiality of houses and households, including architecture intended to shape movement, provide privacy, impose restriction, and elaborate on design standards (Moore 1992, 1996, 2003). Floors, ramps, and wall finishes can be used to indicate household status (Attarian 2003a, 2003b; Bawden 1982; Campbell 1998; Johnson 2010; Klymyshyn 1982; Topic 1977, 1982; Van Gijseghem 2001). Residence morphology and artifact decoration can indicate household ethnicity and immigration episodes (Aldenderfer and Stanish 1993; Dillehay 2001; Johnson 2008; Kent et al. 2009; Rosas Rintel 2010; Swenson 2004; Vaughn 2005). The materiality of assemblages within houses is also meaningful. Finewares and high-value items can be considered markers for household status or ethnic identity (Bawden 1983, 1986, 1994; Gumerman and Briceño 2003; Johnson 2010; Mehaffey 1998; Rosas Rintel 2010; Stanish 1989). Plant and animal remains can signal distribution patterns, economic organization, and wealth and status of household inhabitants (Gumerman 1991; Hastorf 1991; Pozorski 1976; Pozorski and Pozorski 2003; Rosello et al. 2001; Ryser 1998; Shimada and Shimada 1981; Tate 1998; Vasquez and Rosales 2004).

At the end of the twentieth century, archaeologists began to expand and revise this earliest definition of Andean archaeological households (e.g., Janusek 2004, 2009; Nash 2009). A more recent revision of the traditional definition would direct our attention away from a single fundamental pattern and toward the potential diversity of households within a single settlement (Bawden 1982; Pacifico 2014; Shimada 1994; Uceda Castillo and Morales 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006; Uceda Castillo et al. 1997, 1998, 2004; Vogel 2003, 2012). Certainly, this approach complicates archaeological research, but it also promises to reveal richer pictures of life in the past.

The cases detailed in this volume challenge many assumptions about the materiality of households and our interpretations of households’ material remains. Overwhelmingly, the materiality of households is variable. For example, at Caylán (chapter 3) and Wasi Huachuma (chapter 4), residential structures were modified to meet the changing needs of variable household membership, while at Huaca Colorada (chapter 6), ritual modification of an archetypal house was central to social solidarity.

Practice: Households as Corporate Groups

In complement to the material definition of archaeological households, a practice-centered definition endures as well: households are corporate task groups. As task groups, households are taken to be the fundamental social units of production, distribution, transmission, and reproduction (Wilk and Rathje 1982). These abstract tasks take specific forms such as dwelling and decision-making (Blanton 1994, 5); attached, independent, or embedded specialization (Costin 1991a; Janusek 1999); making pots and brewing beer (Jennings and Chatfield 2009; Pacifico 2014); scheduling (Salomon 2004, 46); selective consumption (Burger 1988, 133); ritual practice (chapter 8; Vogel 2003, 2012), and managing the domestic economy of household members (Hirth 2009). Focusing on households as corporate groups has honed attention on bottom-up reconstructions of life in the past, often invoking the domain of everyday life. Much of today’s household research focuses on the individuals who make up the household and the interactions between them and the rest of the community.

Practice-based strategies in household archaeology reveal intrahousehold complexities. At the most basic level, households are made up of people going about their daily lives. People are rational actors making active choices about their subsistence, social, and political strategies (Cowgill 2000). Household members are inherently interdependent but do not always act with regard to the greater good of the group because “the domestic group consists of social actors differentiated by age, gender, role, and power whose agendas and interests do not always coincide” (Hendon 1996, 48). Households provide an arena in which to explore the physical remains of past individuals’ actions, because people have the most control over their daily activities, the majority of which likely take place within and near residential spaces. Therefore, this arena of investigation provides insight into the domain in which people make the most personal decisions pertaining to their well-being and that of fellow household members. For example, the use and deposition of gendered personal artifacts in and around the house suggests strong intrahousehold reproduction of gender identities and gendered practices (chapter 5). Other household practices were variable in response to external and internal forces. While the materiality of houses at Caylán (chapter 3) likely shifted in response to household need, at Pedregal (chapter 8) some household economic practices shifted under the demands of new Chimú overlords, while other household practices remained the same. Household practices also served as corporate strategies used to signal affiliation (at Ventanillas in chapter 8) and autonomy (at Talambo in chapter 9).

Scale: Household, Community, and Neighborhood

Households rarely exist in isolation, and so it is essential to consider the scalar relationships households shared with wider communities. Methodologically, household archaeology shares interests (and often overlaps) with community archaeology and the archaeology of neighborhoods. Both communities and neighborhoods incorporate households. Communities may not necessarily entail clear material correlates or physical spaces, as communities are often defined in large part by ideational components, such as a sense of belonging, conception of identity, and subcultural habitus. Neighborhoods are clearer cases because of their necessarily spatial and material components.

Households have a scalar relationship with communities because households and their members in part comprise communities (Vaughn 1997). Early anthropologists and archaeologists often envisioned the community as a “relatively static, conservative, closed, and homogeneous social unit” made up of individuals living near each other, sharing cultural values, and carrying out similar daily activities within the larger community area (Yaeger and Canuto 2000, 3; e.g., Murdock 1949). However, this perspective often erroneously equates an archaeological site with a social community (Marcus 2000, 231). Instead, we propose that communities are social groups composed of individuals and subgroups sharing spatial, practical, temporal, and conceptual commonalities (Pacifico 2014; Yaeger and Canuto 2000, 5). In this volume, we are particularly sympathetic to the notion of the political community—an entity that draws individuals, groups, and households into a community based on shared interests under a regime of power that marshals spatial, practical, and temporal similarities to create a shared conception of identity (sensu Bawden 2001; Marcus 2000).

Neighborhoods share clearer scalar relationships with households because neighborhoods are emplaced communities that come into being through construction of and interaction with the physical landscape, often during periods of mass migration (Innis-Jiménez 2013, 61–65; Pacifico and Truex 2019a). Neighborhoods constitute a social community but can be studied as a physical space in which people share a common locality and orientation (Gottdiener 1985; Hallman 1984). Archaeologically, a neighborhood is a small area within a larger social landscape that contains dwellings and often community facilities (Hutson 2016; Smith and Novic 2012; Stone 1987). Socially, neighborhoods provide a context in which social, economic, and political networks are created and where norms are reinforced and modified (Hallman 1984; Pacifico and Truex 2019a; Redfield 1960). Houses, neighborhoods, and wider settlement scales may be interdependent precisely because they are nested (Jacobs 1961). This interdependence amplifies the political nature of communities, for neighborhoods often function as political communities with local leaders or representatives that report to higher authorities (Hallman 1984; Lazar 2008; Pacifico 2019; Stone 1987). As elements within a political landscape, households “in urban neighborhoods represent resources in knowledge, information, creativity, commitment, and energy . . . and can channel these resources into constructive pursuits” (Henig 1982, 38).

Because of the politics they imply, scalar relationships between households and communities are important to investigate. Cases in this volume suggest diverse kinds of household-community relationships that may have both social and archaeological consequences. As detailed in several chapters (chapter 5 regarding portable items; chapters 7, 8, and 9 regarding architecture), domestic material culture can signal positive and negative relationships between wider political communities. While household-neighborhood linkages seem clearer due to neighborhoods’ necessarily material characteristics, the peripatetic nature of household conglomerates (chapter 4) highlights the need to lend a critical eye toward even this more friendly category of scale.

Symbolism: Household as Cosmogram, Household as Charged Space

The symbolic valence of residential life operates recursively in two scalar directions: households symbolizing community form and community form shaping household morphology. While traditional Western attitudes toward households might posit a sharp distinction between private and public space, archaeological research increasingly highlights the political and ritual nature of houses and household activities (Manzanilla 1996; Widmer and Storey 1993). Indeed, the household itself is sometimes interpreted as a conceptual map for wider social relationships. For example, at Galindo, Garth L. Bawden (1982) interprets residential configuration as an index of community configuration. Similarly, Alan Kolata (1997) argues that both Inka and Egyptian royal houses provided the conceptual model on which the polity operated: the hyper-oikos. The reverse case should also be considered, wherein the social community provides the conceptual map by which the house is laid out. Indeed, it is probable that these two symbolic modes inform one another. Archaeologically, we might be able to track the shifts in conceptual configurations by tracking changes in house form through time within a single settlement.

The symbolic nature of houses within a wider social and conceptual scale is most evident in this volume in the case of Huaca Colorada (chapter 6), where the seasonal renovation of a ritual structure-cum-archetypal house played a central role in reproducing social solidarity. Nevertheless, more quotidian examples in this volume (figurines, chapter 5; architectural reference, chapters 7, 8, and 9) reinforce the importance of residences as symbolic spaces. However, we are again cautioned from becoming too comfortable in our middle-range theory by chapters 3 and 4, which highlight the mutability of households and residential morphology.

Archaeological Antecedents in Finding and Interpreting Houses and Households

In comparison to monumental structures, residential structures are relatively small, materially impoverished, and poorly preserved. Worse yet, they are often the first remains to be destroyed by “modernizing” developments because they are considered to be expendable. For these reasons, a primary concern in household archaeology has been to identify the archaeological indicators of households and to determine what social phenomena they might index before they are erased. Most of the early household studies focused on defining the household as an archaeological entity, ideally in terms of a single material pattern that could be isolated for analysis and compared across cultures (Blanton 1994; Wilk and Rathje 1982). However, since the household is a social unit made up of people cooperating economically, it is not always circumscribed to a single dwelling, making it a challenge for archaeologists to identify the social unit in the archaeological record (Ashmore and Wilk 1988). Because there is not always a one-to-one correlation between dwelling and family or dwelling and household, early archaeological research that focused on the household as an essentialized unit of analysis merits revisiting (Hendon 1996).

The challenge of household archaeology is that archaeologists recover static remains of people who lived in a dynamic world. Archaeologists are faced with the additional challenge, then, of discerning, defining, and analyzing households through their material correlates in hopes of reconstructing past social organization. From dwellings and artifacts, archaeologists attempt to reconstruct the activities, beliefs, and behaviors of past people. From a palimpsest of static material remnants, archaeologists strive to reconstruct the dynamic social, economic, and political systems within which people lived.

Household archaeology has used residential remains for inferring social structure in the past. The analysis of household organization yields more valuable information when investigating general categories of basic domestic functions, which can then be compared among households or across communities and cultures. While it has often been asserted that households are the primary context within which reproduction and socialization takes place (e.g., Wilk and Netting 1984; Wilk and Rathje 1982), we might reconfigure this as a question: Are households the primary contexts for this? Or do other social groups provide equally or more important contexts for socialization in some societies?

In any case, social structure and social reproduction are key topics in household archaeology. Households are considered a culturally rich context for the socialization of children because “they embody in microcosm many of the dimensions of [social and cultural] context” (Deetz 1982, 724). Since children absorb and learn the basic structure of society within the context of the household, remnants of these ideas and norms permeate the physical remains of the house. The layout and organization of space tells us about the importance of certain activities, the division of labor, and the size and organization of the family. The decoration of utilitarian and valuable items provides us with clues to the wealth, social status, religious ideology, and ethnicity of members in a given household. Such material elements formed important parts of the socialization process as instantiated in everyday life. In this regard, households are one of the most important units of analysis for archaeologists because they provide small contexts rich in cultural information for intensively studying past human behavior and social structure (Wilk and Netting 1984, 2).

Household archaeology has also explored both the nature and meaning of economic activities in the past. Households are typically the smallest context in which collaborative economic production occurs and are the means for organizing production activities and the level of output (Hendon 1996). The organization of production is clearly “affected by cultural rules, codes, and the division of labor within a society,” and these rules are flexible so that people can adapt their social units of production to the specific labor requirements of particular tasks (Wilk and Netting 1984, 7). The products of production fulfill both subsistence needs, such as food and utilitarian items, and social needs, such as prestige and ritual goods and services. Food preparation and craft production have received the most attention by archaeologists because they leave a distinct and interpretable pattern in the archaeological record (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Costin 1991a, 1991b). Investigating food preparation allows us to reconstruct the diet, use of the natural environment, and gender relations in the past (Costin 1996, 1998). Craft production often occurs in the household or adjacent to it and also requires a specialized tool assemblage. These tools provide us with information on the nature of production, including scale, intensity, standardization, and specialization (Costin 1991b; Uceda Castillo and Armas 1997, 1998). Non-utilitarian craft production is an important indicator of social organization, especially when compared across households (Chapdelaine et al. 1995, 2001; Helms 1993; Rengifo and Rojas 2005). Households that produce valuable goods have control over the distribution of desirable and status-building items, thus resulting in a social and sometimes political advantage (Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Russell et al. 1998; Swenson and Warner 2012).

Distribution is also an important activity of households and involves the movement of materials and products from the producers to the consumers (Wilk and Netting 1984). Distribution begets consumption but adds the element of contact between households that would otherwise be ignored. The economic, social, and political contexts of production are evidenced in the patterns of distribution and consumption (Costin 1991a). Distribution and consumption leave traces in the archaeological record that can inform us about demand, distribution, and “stimulating force(s)” behind the production of different goods (Costin 1991a, 3). Variable access to valuable goods reflects differences in economic power and legitimizes existing social hierarchies in stratified societies. Patterns of consumption reveal both economic and ideological bases of elite hegemony. They also reflect how elites control a subjugated population, finance their activities, reinforce status distinction, and justify social differentiation (Costin and Earle 1989).

Ethnographic Explorations of Affinity, Change, and Production

Ethnographic research has helped shape the way archaeologists interpret the material remains of domestic units, because ethnographic models help shape middle-range theories for probing the meaning of domestic archaeological assemblages. Ethnographic analogy can help us better understand kinship and affinity, responses to social changes, and cooperation and production as manifested in household archaeological assemblages. Domestic groups are dynamic and fluid entities that follow a developmental cycle similar to that of a living organism (Fortes 1971, 2). Social reproduction occurs first and foremost in the domestic group through a cyclical process of cultural reinforcement of norms and practices, culminating in the dissolution of the original domestic unit and the succession of its descendant groups (Fortes 1971). Kinship organization, domestic economies, and gender relations are shaped by—and materialized in—houses, because households are where children become socialized to the cultural norms of society. Houses and households are therefore laden with intentional and subliminal social messages about family organization, social values, and gender ideologies. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts are essential for decoding those messages and provide important insider viewpoints that would otherwise be elusive to the outside investigator. For example, in chapter 5, ethnohistoric accounts of shamanistic practices help interpret ritual objects found in the archaeological record.

One way ethnographic research contributes to analogical insight is by providing living illustrations of the social dimensions of kinship, family, and household units—dimensions that may be archaeologically invisible but interpretable using ethnographic case studies. Understanding marriage patterns (monogamy, polygyny) or residence patterns (matrilocal, patrilocal) is almost impossible without written records or oral accounts. Ethnographic examples are especially important here, given the subtle complexities of parsing family, household, and kinship. While the family is a kinship group, the household is a social unit that shares in production and consumption activities (Bender 1967). Families can be explored alongside households, but the researcher must be aware that the two are not always correlated. Ethnographic accounts show us that some families live in the same structure, some in several structures linked together by a communal courtyard, and others in separate areas or villages altogether (Coupland 1996; Haviland 1988). In addition, some households can be made up of several families, an entire lineage, or kin and unrelated individuals (Coupland and Banning 1996; Manzanilla 1996).

A specific example of the nuanced connection among kinship, household, and domestic property is the société à maison, or “house society,” as invoked in chapter 6. The “house society” was originally outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1982) as a corporate-based dwelling unit that was not formed strictly around family, lineage, or clan membership, but rather on cultural determinants of identity and membership that could include affinal, political, or negotiated relationships (e.g., Hayden and Cannon 1982; Manzanilla 1996; Touretellot 1988). The concept of the house society illustrates the complexities of defining the household through merely physical remains due to the fluidity of household occupation throughout the year and cultural ideals dictating household membership and inheritance (Gillespie 2000). However, the concept is essential for understanding the complexities of household membership, interpreting residential goods, and discerning the symbolic role of households as a link to the imagined origins of corporate groups. It is also a model of membership that helps illuminate the dynamic nature of households’ spatial and temporal configuration. Giles Spence Morrow (chapter 6) marshals sociétés à maison—a concept originally applied to European contexts—to the Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, to tie together space, people, and practices.

Ethnographic studies have also helped us better understand how households are affected by social change. Such studies can have important implications for understanding the dynamic nature of households (e.g., mutability, flexibility, adaptability) as well as for interpreting the diversity observed in household remains across time and space. For example, when the Matsigenka Indians of the Peruvian Amazon moved from small, dispersed hamlets to the large village settlement at Camaná, hinterland social organization was replicated within the new socially organized space (Baksh 1984). People moved into clustered groups within the village but remained close to related kin: “Like stones in a mosaic, hamlets retain their shape even when combined into a larger village” (Johnson 2003, 169). Similarly, Susan Lobo (1992) found that when twentieth-century villagers relocated to Lima, they partially reproduced the sociospatial landscape of their previous settlement in their new urban context.

Ethnographic cases also provide meaningful models for understanding interaction, cooperation, and production among households in the archaeological record. The comfort of familiar social organization combined with the economic benefits of sharing labor and resources with kin predicts that people are more likely to cooperate with relatives when confronted with a new and daunting social environment. This was the case with Michael Baksh’s (1984) account of the Matsigenka. This pattern has been observed archaeologically at many incipient urban settlements around the world (e.g., Johnson 2010; Postgate 1990; Widmer and Storey 1993). This generalized pattern helps archaeologists understand household organization at the kin, lineage, and neighborhood levels in different domestic contexts. In chapter 3, David Chicoine, Hugo Ikehara, and Jessica Ortiz draw upon ethnohistoric and historic models of parcialidades and señorios as benchmarks for interpreting the material components of Precolumbian households, especially with respect to production. In chapter 7, David Pacifico explores the extent to which household diversity is related to household labor resources and level of participation in a multiscalar urban ritual economy.

Andean Applications of Household Archaeology and Ethnographic Analogy

Scholars tend to view Precolumbian Andean households as if they took one of two forms: the nuclear family or an extended family in some configuration often related to the ayllu model. As Donna Nash (2009, 210) observes, these two household forms are typically thought to articulate with other such groups in one of two ways: as vertical archipelagos in the highlands (especially in the south) following John Murra’s (1985) famous model and as horizontally interconnected specialist communities (especially on the north coast of Peru) as described by María Rostworoski de Diez Conseco (1977). These models are necessarily applied through the backward-facing lens of colonial intervention. So this pair of binary categories is only a broad-brush characterization of myriad households in the past. Moreover, these categories are often challenged in the dispersed literature focusing on Andean households.

While ethnographic accounts of Andean families in the Colonial Period suggest that nuclear families were common, there is a strong likelihood that this interpretation was influenced by colonialism itself as colonial forces aimed to reconfigure indigenous society around “rational” models fitting Catholic Spanish values (Stanish 1989, 1992). Alternatively, many archaeologists explore archaeological households through the lens of the ayllu. The ayllu is a kinship model based on duality that can encompass several or hundreds of families, though the term can carry connotations of location, resource allocation, and political affiliation (D’Altroy 2002; Janusek 2004; Wernke 2013). Both of these models draw most heavily on highland cases (Nash 2009, 208), though detailed historical and ethnographic accounts suggest that even highland households are more complicated than implied by the nuclear/extended binary. For example, Enrique Mayer’s (2002) transhistorical study of households suggests pulsating combination and dispersion, because nuclear families and extended communities meet their respective basic needs through periodic communion and individualization. Moreover, this dynamism accounts even for inanimate (through Western eyes) objects. Catherine Allen’s (1998) account of Andean households suggests that domestic items can become members of households, and so household dynamism includes nonhuman members because both human and nonhuman beings share a fundamental essence of being as well as reciprocal responsibilities to one another.

In the expansive literature on North Coast archaeology, some of these underemphasized details are present in the largely dispersed studies on households. In them we see quite a diversity of houses and households within and between societies. The seminal volume Chan Chan: Andean Desert City (Moseley and Day 1982) presents a number of distinct patterns in houses and households. This diversity gives us pause to reconsider traditional binary models. Kenneth Day (1982, 63) explains that Chan Chan’s most iconic architecture, the ciudadela, served as royal residences that contrasted with at least two other contemporaneous residential forms: elite compounds and small irregular agglutinated rooms (SIAR). Alexandra Klymyshyn (1982, 124) explains that among the thirty-five elite compounds, there are six different variations in these residences, which housed intermediate elites. John R. Topic (1982, 148–57) explores commoner residences in depth at Chan Chan. He famously describes these dense compounds of innumerable internal divisions and notes that they follow three patterns: neighborhood-like clusters, platform-top clusters, and anomalous patterns (Topic 1982, 150). Indeed, Topic (1982, 153–7) even notes a variety of kitchen configurations, including formal, informal, and communal kitchens. At Chan Chan alone, then, there are more than a dozen residential forms practiced within the capital of the Chimú Empire.

A more expansive review shows diverse approaches to North Coast households and more diverse findings than we might anticipate in terms of house morphology, household form, and the contours of domestic authority. For example, Bawden’s (1982) study of Galindo suggests a connection between residence form and community organization. The variety of residence forms found by archaeologists, then, problematizes simple models in understanding Andean households on the North Coast. Christopher J. Attarian’s (2003b) study suggests that during the Early Intermediate Period in the Chicama Valley, ceramic manufacture and distribution reflect the intentional choices of households in asserting household and community identity. Furthermore, Hendrik Van Gijseghem’s (2001) study of houses at Moche revealed three types of residences relating to differences in status and family configuration. The volume Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals: A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity (Manzanilla and Chapdelaine 2009) expands on Van Gijseghem’s (2001) findings, with half the essays dedicated to a variety of Andean cases. Claude Chapdelaine’s (2009) examination of residents at Huacas de Moche argues that, despite some differences, Moche residences were typified by central, multipurpose rooms with benches. Their domestic assemblages indicate that these urban dwellers were deeply reliant on—and therefore tied to—hinterland populations (Chapdelaine 2009). Despite a certain dependency on people outside the city, Hélène Bernier’s (2010) study of craft production at Moche also suggests a certain level of household autonomy in production.

In subsequent North Coastal societies, we see that house forms, household composition, and household autonomy also seem variable. Topic’s (2009) revisiting of Chimú commoners demonstrates that the overarching Chimú control of production still left much space in domestic economies for certain forms of autonomy. This finding resonates with the conclusions Jerry Moore (1989) draws about the domestic economy and state involvement at the later Chimú-Casma site of Manchán. In addition, Melissa Vogel’s (2012) study of Cerro la Cruz, in the Chao Valley, points to microscale symbolism evidenced in the small sacrifices (e.g., twists of hair) residents made in their houses. These are evidence of autonomy at least in the domain of domestic ritual. David Pacifico’s findings at the Casma state capital El Purgatorio (chapter 7) indicate multiple different contemporaneous household configurations.

In complement to dispersed studies, we find only two volumes to date dedicated to Andean household archaeology that explore the ayllu model of Andean households in one or more of the connotations it carries. Mark Aldenderfer and Charles Stanish’s (1993) Domestic Architecture, Ethnicity, and Complementarity in the South-Central Andes set the stage for future household archaeology in the Andes. Acknowledging the potential diversity of household forms, essays in that volume aim to probe for ethnic identity and juxtaposition, to explore complementarity models in the Andes, and to “seek the smallest architectural and artifactual assemblage repeated over a settlement” (Stanish 1989, 11). Similarly, Terence D’Altroy and Christine Hastorf’s (2001) volume Empire and Domestic Economy explores the productive pursuits and political integration of households from a political-economic standpoint.

In the following section, we summarize the findings of the subsequent chapters in this book, some of which challenge the very integrity of the term household. We find residences that are both monumental and symbolic entities for orienting larger settlements. We find households that shapeshift as they move across the landscape in a seasonal cycle; we find household items that give insight into the intricate social relations in the most intimate settings; and, of course, we find that households rarely exist in a vacuum, and we are prompted to explore the different kinds of relationships different households may have with their neighbors, neighboring settlements, and neighboring societies.