Most of us spent a lot more time at home this year, and chances are you have reflected a little more than usual on physical and geographic variability in domestic life. You may have ruminated on how social relations might be shaped differently by whether we live in dense or dispersed settings, whether we reside in single-family houses or connected apartments, or the amount of private space we occupy and how is it balanced with the public spaces we are accustomed to enjoying. This timely edited volume by Christina Halperin and Lauren Schwartz examines variability in domestic lifeways within the precolumbian Americas through the particular lens of what, following a linguistic analogy, could be branded as architectural vernaculars. Evocations of linguistics within architectural studies are common, because they capture tensions between tradition or rule-boundedness with innovation and creative expression in semiotic practices. They have been adapted by archaeologists as is the case here and in parallel scholarship on “architectural grammars” or “space syntax.” Contributors to the volume did not converge on a unified definition for vernacular architecture, and some terms that they use as synonyms include common or ordinary buildings, domestic architecture, and utilitarian building practices. Yet, in the aggregate, the chapters demonstrate how the construct can be heuristically employed to highlight how past peoples made conscientious choices in building styles and techniques across the spectrum of settlement type and socioeconomic status.
The volume is organized into three thematic sections with bookending introductory (Halperin and Schwartz) and concluding (Julia Hendon) chapters. Authors often engage multiple themes, but the division provides greater coherence to the cases. The first part focuses on issues of construction and production and features cases from the coastal (Jerry Moore) and highland (Anna Guengerich) Andes and from lowland Mesoamerica (Schwartz). The section that follows places greater emphasis on issues relating to style and cultural or household identity, with cases from the Wari (Donna Nash) and Maya (Halperin) worlds. A final section engages more with temporal change and includes cases from highland Mesoamerica (Kristin De Lucia) and from the wide-ranging North American interaction spheres centered on Cahokia, in Illinois (Susan Alt), and Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico (Kellam Throgmorton).
Halperin and Schwartz open by noting that vernacular architecture “is both everywhere and nowhere” (p. 3). Although it may constitute more than 90% of the world's built environment, the pivotal role of the everyday rhythms of life once lived in such structures was ignored by earlier generations of archaeologists in favor of elite and public architecture. Excavations of non-elite architecture were largely an outgrowth of the disciplinary shift in attention to settlement survey, when excavation of domestic spaces was often folded into regionally based research. As De Lucia notes in her chapter, a focus on vernacular architecture helps remind us that non-elites possessed agency and that we should reject implicit assumptions in the framing of analyses of elite or monumental buildings in terms of intentional actions and strategies, whereas analyses of common buildings are framed merely in terms of function and rule-bound tradition.
Varied strategies of non-elites are explored by authors using different methods. Both Moore and Guengerich incorporate ethnographic analogies from the Andes into their studies. Yet whereas Moore's study is an ethnoarchaeological exploration of the use life of dwellings made from tabique, Guengerich draws on contemporary Andean practices of reciprocal labor in kin networks in proposing that houses in the Chachapoyas region reflect a neolocal residence pattern, with variance in labor costs relating to social capital and networks. Several contributors examine how vernacular architecture can be in discourse with types and styles of buildings promoted by powerful political and religious institutions. This could be manifested in local adaptations or “losses in translation,” as Schwartz argues was the case for circular shrines at smaller sites in the Maya region juxtaposed with monumental examples at state capitals. Stylistic variability and hybridity could also indicate tensions in administrative relations and worldviews between colonizing and subject populations in expansionistic states and empires, as suggested by Nash for the provincial Moquegua region during the Wari horizon. Architectural variability within shared macro-traditions may relate more to utilitarian and ecological concerns, as Throgmorton argues for the Chacoan Southwest, or be a purposeful archaism in a radically new order, as Alt proposes for the Cahokian world.
The volume represents a significant contribution to household archaeology in the Americas by highlighting issues of conscious decision making on the part of non-elites and how the “99 percent” within past societies created, adapted, or rejected more formal or institutional architecture as part of the trajectory of long-term societal change.
