Household Archaeology

[FIrst paragraph] One of the main concerns of household archaeology are the activities that took place within houses, particularly concerning food processing and food consumption. In the 1980s Richard C. Wilk and William C. Rathje argued that archaeological evidence for domestic sites provide the material evidence for households in the form of the dwelling, with its activity areas and the possessions. They also argued that households were the locations from which labour was pooled for production, including food production, and for the distribution of resources (e.g. food) from producers to consumers, within or outside the household. However, these arguments tend to present a household as a single unit rather than as systems of membership where a number of people – e.g. biological family, extended family, servants, slaves – might have lived together but have been involved in the preparation and consumption of food in different ways and possibly in different parts of the site.