BMCR 2009.07.54: Baird on Souvatzi, A Social Archaeology of Households in Neolithic Greece: An Anthropological Approach

Stella G. Souvatzi, A Social Archaeology of Households in Neolithic
Greece: An Anthropological Approach.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge
University Press, 2008.  Pp. xxi, 309.  ISBN 9780521836890.  $95.00.

Reviewed by J. A. Baird, Birkbeck College, University of London
([email protected])
Word count:  2290 words
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Everyday life and households have been the topics of increased
scholarly examination in recent years, and Souvatzi has been part of a
recent upsurge in studies of ancient housing and households.[[1]] The
book under review claims no less than to be "the first to address the
household as a process and as a conceptual and analytical means through
which we can interpret social organisation from the bottom up." In it,
Souvatzi, after setting out current approaches to the household in the
social sciences generally and archaeology specifically, uses detailed
examples from the Greek Neolithic to look at the ways in which
households can be a means of interpreting social organisation.

The first chapter gives an overview of approaches to the household in
the social sciences. Souvatzi brings together the broad body of
scholarship on the concept of the household to demonstrate that it is a
process and thus she moves away from earlier, more static definitions.
This approach allows her to go beyond the tendencies towards
essentialism in earlier work and to allow for fluidity not only in
defining the household but also in approach; Souvatzi demonstrates that
research should be dynamic to allow for the household as a dialectical
process. An important archaeological ramification in this chapter,
which does not include archaeological approaches, is the understanding
of household space that is defined by activities rather than,
necessarily, physical structures. This allows for an approach to the
household which is culturally and historically embedded and that can be
productive without relying on co-residence for its definition. Drawing
broadly on the social sciences, Souvatzi's analysis and critique of
approaches to households will be useful reading for archaeologists and
others seeking to study the topic. This aspect alone makes the volume a
worthwhile read, and Souvatzi carefully avoids culturally-specific
arguments while making good use of salient, if sometimes repeated,
examples.

The overview of archaeological approaches to households in the second
chapter is similarly useful. Souvatzi argues that previous approaches
have largely seen the household as being formed by and reacting to
larger-scale changes, rather than investigating daily life and
households in their own right. The repeated assertion that there has
been a lack of interest by archaeologists in the everyday is true, but
it is curious that Souvatzi does not engage with the substantial body
of theory on this topic beyond Bourdieu's habitus and the work of
Giddens (e.g. de Certeau, Lefebvre, and the recent work of Highmore).
In this second chapter Souvatzi also sets out her alternative framework
for the interpretation of the household. This alternative framework is
one which is decidedly not prescriptive on specific terms. The social
sciences, Souvatzi argues, have addressed the indeterminate nature of
the household as a process, but archaeology has not done this because
of its lack of focus on the household qua household. Souvatzi notes the
problem of integrating understandings of agency and social dynamics in
archaeological approaches which use economic indicators to assess
difference within and between sites. After addressing this "problem of
indeterminacy" Souvatzi broaches "the issue of variability" which
addresses a range of problems, including the way in which
archaeologists tend to create 'ideal' households or household types for
settlements. In refusing to address the gap between the ideal and the
real, as Souvatzi puts it, variation (including between households and
over time) and the reasons for it are missed. One despairs for the
state of archaeology, though, if such detailed critique is really
necessary to encourage the use of (basically) a contextual approach and
the employment of different categories and scales of evidence.
Something that is not fully explicated here is how the temporality of
activities works within this new framework; it seems that something
which archaeology could bring to broader understandings of the
household (given its chronological depth) is a problematised
understanding of time, beyond households as process. Souvatzi does more
to tackle this issue in her case studies than in the general framework.

Another part of Souvatzi's framework is household economics, where she
argues for a study of household economy which sees the limits of
discussions framed within terms of rationality and instead seeks to
understand the household economy in terms of not only self-interest but
also morality, and in so doing to recognise the household's place as
more than a pragmatic entity. Souvatzi also moves away from tendencies
in much recent archaeological writing to focus on the individual with
such questions as "If individuals are the most pertinent agents of
action and change, then why do they persist across time and space in
organising themselves into such complex productive, distributive, and
reproductive groups as households?" (p39).  A very good question, but
one that itself suggests a degree of agency amongst household members
with regard to their membership in that group and also a leap of logic
when it comes to the definition of household that Souvatzi has never
really provided. The rest of the second chapter consists of sections on
'the individual and the collective', 'social complexities' and
'structure and agency, reproduction and change: a historical
dimension'. All of these topics are complex, and Souvatzi cuts a swath
through them to develop an approach to the household that incorporates
"complexity, dynamics, historical specificity, and dialectics" (p. 46).
The points made by Souvatzi on the theories and problems of studying
the household are valid, but (in part due to the structure of the book,
with its separate theory and case-study chapters) these theoretical
households might be too theoretical for some readers. And while
Souvatzi is arguing for, to an extent, a definition of household that
is more 'fuzzy' and contextual, some of the assertions are a little too
vaguely substantiated; the households described just "are". Souvatzi is
indeed so effective in her quashing of previous approaches and
assumptions about what a household is that the reader might be left
wondering if it is a worthwhile concept after all.

The chapters that follow seek to put the approach set out in the first
part of the book into practice. Chapter three, on the Neolithic in
Greece, is an overview of the period for the purpose of framing the
subsequent chapters. The fourth chapter, entitled "The Ideal and the
Real: the examples of Early Neolithic Nea Nikomedeia and Middle
Neolithic Sesklo" uses the evidence of these sites to implement
Souvatzi's perspective as set out in the previous chapters. At Nea
Nikomedeia, Souvatzi demonstrates (using evidence including a structure
likely used as a communal building and burials throughout the site
which respect similar patterns) that there seems to be a complex social
organisation evident there, with spatial and social organisation and
functional differentiation of space which belie usual interpretations
of the such early Neolithic settlements that presuppose loose groupings
of households engaged in subsistence activities. While Souvatzi is
convincing on this community level of organisation, its relationship to
the assumed households is unclear. Middle Neolithic Sesklo, one of the
most intensively investigated Neolithic sites of Greece, is the other
example in this chapter. Souvatzi shows that the open spaces associated
with houses were an important part of the settlement and uses this
observation to argue for a lack of a division of space between 'public'
and 'domestic'. Space at the site is shown to be highly structured,
with domestic space (both interior and external) being, broadly,
symmetrically organised, and "[t]hese patterns suggest that the
organisation of space may have been defined on a system of order and
classification which revolves around the principles of symmetry and
articulates links between the social structure, the symbolic order, and
the 'natural' order or the cosmos" (p. 90). One can, at this point,
almost hear Bourdieu and Le/vi-Strauss whispering over Souvatzi's
shoulder. Patterning in the material culture also indicates a socially
regulated use of particular spaces for certain activities, and material
culture indicates a degree of craft specialisation. The patterning
throughout the site is indicative, argues Souvatzi, of "community-wide
standards" (p. 95), and the treatment of external space and placement
of houses in relation to 'community space' including lanes and squares
indicates "collective planning" (ibid.).

The fifth chapter uses the case study of Dimini, and usefully
demonstrates how the limitations of legacy data can be overcome using a
multi-pronged approach of archival data, new fieldwork, and careful
study of ceramics and small finds. Souvatzi shows that households might
be seen to inhabit particular houses, but that they also can be seen in
other spatial configurations, including external spaces and other
structures.  Overall, this chapter is successful at demonstrating the
ways in which the patterning of space and objects is indicative of
community organisation and practices, and, as the title of the chapter
asserts, that "complexity is not only about hierarchy". When, as
Souvatzi demonstrates, the spurious connection to Homeric texts is
broken, the archaeology shows not elite 'megaron' households leading
but rather a community of connected households using a range of
communal and individual (household) strategies.

The sixth chapter, "Homogeneity or Diversity? Household as Variable
Processes", uses a range of Greek Neolithic evidence to examine
households from different contexts. The variation evident demonstrates
that, in the Greek Neolithic, as elsewhere, the notion of 'type sites'
or typical sites is problematic. Among the interesting commonalties
Souvatzi does identify between sites is the importance of the household
as a ritual unit in addition to an economic one (p. 195). Overall,
Souvatzi sees a "relatively uniform Greek Neolithic culture" (p. 203)
within which households are diverse in (for example) morphology,
ideology, and economic activity. A problem is that these are among the
things which define the household in the first place.

In the seventh chapter, Souvatzi discusses the place of households in
broader models of change and asserts that households themselves
generate social change. Heterarchy prevails in Souvatzi's explanations
of social organisation rather than hierarchy.  This is a very useful
discussion, but it is odd that much of Souvatzi's framework claims to
work from the 'bottom up': one wonders where this apocryphal bottom is,
if there is no hierarchy. Souvatzi proposes a Greek Neolithic so
complex that no model can contain it-this is part of Souvatzi's stated
agenda, in that too much attention has been paid to making
generalisations and not enough to micro-level processes. There is a
danger, though, that this analysis replaces one type of generalisation
with another, creating a Neolithic so variable and so complex it is
almost impossible to conceptualise. That said, societies are indeed
variable and complex, and Souvatzi's work embraces this rather than
seeing it as a problem. The eighth and final chapter is a short
conclusion examining the broader implications of the book for social
archaeology.

This important volume does have some of the common problems of having
evolved from the author's PhD thesis (2000, Cambridge), for example the
often turgid prose and the structure. Souvatzi makes many interesting
and important points on the Neolithic, in particular concerning the
nature and form of the communities and the use of space, and makes
excellent use of the ceramic evidence. These observations do not always
arise from or relate to households, and the choice from the start of
the volume to use the household as the defining group of Souvatzi's
study almost does injustice to the breadth of material she covers in
the second portion of the book. It might be considered a strength,
though, that households and larger communities are considered together
and that households are not extracted as a unit of study from the
society of which they are a part.

Similarly, the abrupt break between the theory and data chapters
contributes to a problem of terminology, namely that much vocabulary
discounted in the first section of the book is used in the second. This
is particularly irritating in the use of 'domestic' and the sometimes
indiscriminate movement between the terms house and household (on
occasion even "house/household" is used, as at p. 115) which is
problematic given the theoretical stance set out at the start of the
book, the repeated assertion that singular buildings are not
necessarily conterminous with households, and that (p. 150) households
use a variety of spaces within settlements. Household composition is
not discussed, and the definitions are so dynamic (partly in Souvatzi's
reaction against a body of archaeological theory which she argues
places too much emphasis on the individual) that it is difficult to
imagine people into these communities. While some might consider this
depopulation unproblematic, one of the lures of the study of
archaeological households is precisely their immediacy and the ease of
analogy, and, although it can be appreciated that household as a
concept should be culturally and historically situated, it is equally
true that it is people that make them up and that examining the
micro-level evidence, as Souvatzi does, might be a way of accessing
them. Souvatzi cannot be expected, though, to reconcile all the
problems of archaeology, as seen, for example, in the tension in
current archaeological approaches between the individual, identity
studies, issues of agency, and grand narratives and models.

This book is particularly successful in showing that the household can
be usefully examined not by looking for spatially discrete units or
architectural structures but by examining, contextually, activities. It
also successfully bridges micro and macro as levels of analysis and
shows that households cannot be studied separately from the broader
societies they are a part of. Its central problem is that it makes the
reader work very hard to appreciate both the breadth of the analysis
and the relevance of its approach to broader studies. Despite these
issues, this is a useful book that adds much to our current
understandings of the household. It will be of interest to those
studying the Neolithic and to those interested in the variable nature
of housing and households more generally.


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Notes:


1.   See for instance her contribution in Westgate, Ruth, Nick Fischer
and James Whitley, eds. (2007). Building Communities: House, Settlement
and Society in the Aegean and Beyond. London, British School at Athens.