The Prehistory of Home. Jerry D. Moore
mollusk the designer of its shell…. Human beings, on the other hand, are the authors of their own designs, constructed through a self-conscious decision process—an intentional selection of ideas.”1
The human creation of home—as dwelling, as social unit, as metaphor—is extraordinarily varied; every home is a constructed compromise. As the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has written, “Unlike even the most elaborate animal construction, human building involves decision and choice, always and inevitably; it therefore involves a project.”2
Such projects counterpoise decisions about different issues—cost, material constraints, environmental stresses, functions, style, social statuses, and symbolic contents, among others—and then express a specific resolution of those issues in architectural form. This is true of all buildings, whenever and wherever humans have constructed them.
And this is particularly true of homes. In addition to their basic and fundamental function of providing shelter from natural elements, dwellings are powerful and complex concentrates of human existence. More than passive backdrops to human actions, our dwellings reflect and shape our lives. Dwellings are powerful condensers of meanings, second only to the human body as a model for thinking about the world. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,” and those webs thickly drape our homes.3
This is all relatively obvious: humans build and occupy a diversity of dwellings, those constructions require assessing multiple factors, and dwellings are a pivotal place around which humans construct cultural meanings. Yet, two facts make these relatively noncontentious propositions challenging.
First, the specific constellations of dimensions and meanings encoded by dwellings are extraordinarily variable and complex. And this truth was made abundantly clear to me during a long and confused conversation with a campesino in far northern Peru.
Since 1996 I have conducted archaeological investigations in the Department of Tumbes, on Peru’s tropical northern frontier. A distinctive type of vernacular architecture is built in Tumbes known as tabique. The building technique uses natural materials from the dry scrub forest, a thicket of thorn-covered shrubs, vines, and cacti interspersed with kapok and algarobbo trees. Although the vegetation is dense, few trees grow sufficiently tall or straight to be sawn into boards.
Tabique buildings accommodate these material constraints. The dwellings are rectangular in plan, framed by upright posts planted in the corners and at 1- to 2-meter intervals along the wall. Horizontal paired lengths of split bamboo are tied or nailed onto the inside and outside of the uprights posts, leaving a 5- to 10-centimeter gap into which sticks are jammed. The wedged sticks form the fabric of the wall, which may be left as a ragged comb of sticks or—if the residents can afford it—a plasterer is hired to slather the tabique wall with daub mixed from clay and steer manure.
In 2003 we were excavating a small site, and I was walking near the site when I saw a man making adobe bricks. The man recognized me as the gringo archaeologist, and we began to chat.
FIGURE 1. A tabique house, Tumbes, Peru, 2003.
The man already had a house made from tabique, so I was curious why he was preparing to build another house of adobes. In the tropics, wooden structures are usually felled by rot and termites, so I assumed that the tabique house was approaching the end of its use-life. This simple assumption was profoundly wrong.
The man and I exchanged “buenos días” and then I said the obvious:
“I see you’re making adobes.”
“Yes, señor.”
“Is your tabique house very old?”
“No, señor, it is only a few years old. It’s a good, solid house.”
“So, why are you making adobe bricks?”
“Because there is no work around here.”
I paused to digest this information. “Are you going to sell the bricks?”
“No, I am going to build a new house. My wife left me.”
Another pause.
“Do you think she will come back if you build a new house for her?”
“No, señor. She ran off with that son-of-a-bitch, Guillermo Flores.4 She’s never coming back.” He shook his head in disgust.
“So, why are you building a new house?”
“Because there is no work around here.”
At this point I was completely confused: “I’m sorry—I don’t understand. Why are you building a new house?”
The man gave me a look reserved for the mentally challenged: “There is no work around here. I have to go to town to find work. My wife left me, so there will be no one here to watch over my belongings. Anyone can break into a tabique house. So I have to build a stronger house of adobe bricks.”
It was an ethnographic encounter reminiscent of the story of the Three Little Pigs.
In a marvelously pragmatic but complex way, this man’s decision to build a house of adobes was based on his own technical expertise, his access to raw materials, regional socioeconomic factors, security concerns, and his matrimonial tumults. Far from being a straightforward matter of imposing a mental construct onto passive raw materials, this house reflected multiple decision domains.
And every house always does.
Thus, the first factor that makes understanding human dwellings so interesting and challenging is that they are the material expressions of intersecting considerations. Our homes provide shelter and they express our identities. Dwellings enclose social groups of various sizes, from single individuals to entire religious communities. Houses vary in size, permanence, symbolic valence, functions, and so on, reflecting the varieties of the domestic experience.
And the second challenge to understanding home is this: We have been building homes longer than we have been Homo sapiens.
. . .
For the last thirty years, I have been digging into people’s homes. Working in the dry desert coast of Peru, I have excavated ancient houses built from river canes in A.D. 1400–1500 and uncovered a large work camp built circa A.D. 1350. I studied a small eighteenth-century native Chumash hut in Southern California built during the cultural penumbra between initial contact with Europeans and the full onslaught of Spanish colonialism. As a member of my wife’s archaeological project in southern Mexico, I excavated the remnants of pole and thatch houses from the Colonial period and studied architecturally similar modern pole and thatch houses to understand the dynamics of construction and decay in the hot tropics. In Baja California, I have mapped open-air encampments and rock shelters of hunters and gatherers who occupied the peninsula from 4500 B.C. to A.D. 1800. In my recent expeditions in far northern Peru, I have excavated small elliptical pole and thatch houses that date to 4700–4300 B.C., large structures that probably housed extended families at 3500–3100 B.C., rectangular houses built from wattle and daub after 900–500 B.C., and the remnants of tabique houses occupied when the Inca Empire expanded into the region after A.D. 1470.
Although all my archaeological fieldwork has been in the Americas—Southern California, Baja California, southern Mexico, and Peru—these projects explored various prehistoric and historic cultures, occupying distinct environments, organized as diverse societies, and pursuing different livelihoods. The common element among them is that home was central to all these divergent lives.
I am endlessly intrigued by the prehistory of home. The creativity invested in dwellings is astounding. But beyond this, I must confess to a somewhat personal and what some might see as a less-than-scholarly interest in the prehistory of home: I deeply love my home.
My family and I live in a modest house in Long Beach, California. Long Beach is notable among Southern