The message of grinding stones and porridge
The advance of household archaeology
MúzeumCafé 45.
What can be understood by the term ‘household’? How differently does a man, a woman, a housewife or a sociologist regard what constitutes a household? How does the notion of a household change when it is regarded from the aspect of a family or examined in relation to economic and social processes? Can the activities of households existing several thousand years ago be reconstructed merely by means of archaeological finds? The archaeology of households as an independent line of research can be seen in an increasing number of projects. So much so, that it was the main theme of the 7th Meeting of Prehistoric Researchers held in ‘Matrica’ Museum in 2011. The conference, which looked at the opportunities and results of household archaeology, set the aim of defining the household as a research issue and examined the prehistoric household as a physical and symbolic unit of production and consumption. In 2014 Szilvia Fábián, archaeologist and project coordinator of the Hungarian National Museum National Heritage Protection Centre, defended her dissertation entitled The Settlement History of the Baden Culture in the Southern Region along Lake Balaton Based on the Latest Research Results, while András Rajna, archaeologist at the Ferenczy Museum, is currently finishing his thesis on the settlement history of the Late Copper Age. The expression ‘archaeology of households’ was first used in 1982, but the methodology of archaeological research of households was established as much by the volume The Early Mesoamerican Village, published in 1976, as the French Annales School. Since then the archaeology of households, or the archaeology of household activities, is playing an increasingly important role in examining cultures without any written records or with a limited use of records.