No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households: (9 Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology)

No Place Like Home: Ancient Near Eastern Houses and Households had its genesis in a series of six popular and well-attended ASOR conference sessions on Household Archaeology in the Ancient Near East. A selection of papers are presented here, together with four invited contributions. The 18 chapters are organized in three thematic sections. Chapters in the first, Architecture as Archive of Social Space, profile houses as records of the lives of inhabitants, changing and adapting with residents; many offer a background focus on how human behavior is shaped by the walls of one’s own home. This section also includes innovative approaches to understanding who dwelled in these homes. For instances, one chapter explores evidence for children in a house, another surveys what it was like to live in a military barracks. The middle section, The Active Household, focuses on the evidence for how residents carried out household activities including work and food preparation. Chapters include the ‘heart of household archaeology’ in their application of activity area research, but also drill down to the social significance of what residents were doing or eating, and where such actions were taking place. The final section, Ritual Space at Home, features studies on the house as ritual space. The entire complement of chapters provides the latest research on houses and households spanning the Chalcolithic to the Roman periods and from Turkey to Egypt.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction: No Place Like Home – Laura Battini, Aaron Brody, and Sharon R. Steadman ; Architecture as Archive of Social Space ; Chapter 2. ‘Social House’ Theory and Egyptian Archaeology – Nicholas Picardo ; Chapter 3. Households, Communities, and Dimensions of Social Identity in the Early Iron Age at Tall al-ʿUmayri, Jordan – Monique D. Vincent ; Chapter 4. Houses and Households in Urartu: Evidence from the Outer Town at Ayanis – Paul Zimansky ; Chapter 5. Living at the Gate: Identification of Military Housing at Neo-Assyrian Tušhan (Ziyaret Tepe) – Timothy Matney, Tina L. Greenfield, Kemalettin Köroǧlu, John MacGinnis, Britt Hartenberger, and Melissa Rosenzweig ; Chapter 6. Neo-Babylonian Domestic Houses at Ur in Social Perspective – Laura Battini ; Chapter 7. Identity at the Twilight of Empire: Domestic Foodways and Cultural Practice at 12th Century BC Beth-Shean – Jacob C. Damm ; The Active Household ; Chapter 8. ‘Work/Life Balance’ in Late Chalcolithic Anatolia: Household Activities and Spatial Organization at Çadır Höyük – Stephanie Selover, Laurel D. Hackley, and Sharon R. Steadman ; Chapter 9. Household Archaeology During the Early Bronze III of Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath – Haskel J. Greenfield, Jon Ross, Shira Albaz, Tina L. Greenfield, Jeremy A. Beller, Suembikya Frumin, Ehud Weiss, and Aren M. Maeir ; Chapter 10. House, Household, and The Umm An-Nar: Structure SS1 at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bat, Sultanate of Oman – Jennifer Swerida ; Chapter 11. A Closer Look: The Houses on the Southeastern Hill of Jerusalem in Economic Perspective – Margreet L. Steiner ; Chapter 12. The Daily Bread at Tell Halif: An Overview of Food Production and Consumption – Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, Tim Frank, and Oded Borowski ; Chapter 13. Living and Working at Home: Workshops and Workplaces in Romano-Egyptian Houses – Anna Lucille Boozer ; Ritual Space at Home ; Chapter 14. Accidental or Intentional?: An Ubaid Period Burnt Structure at Kenan Tepe, Turkey – Marie Hopwood ; Chapter 15. Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamian Houses: A Ritualized Space? – Juliette Mas ; Chapter 16. Ritual Allsorts: An Archaeology of Domestic Religious Admixture in Kültepe-Kaneš – Yağmur Heffron

About the Author :
Laura Battini is a researcher specialising in Mesopotamia (II-I millennia BC), currently at the French National Centre of Scienfic Research. Laura created a new journal for the Ancient Near East (Ash sharq, Archaeopress), and is the editor of the series Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology. Aaron Brody is the Robert and Kathryn Riddell Professor of Bible and Archaeology and Director of the Badè Museum at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. His research interests include archaeology of the southern Levant, religion, society, economy, identity and ethnicity, postcolonialism, and maritime and deepwater archaeology. Sharon R. Steadman is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. She codirects the archaeological excavations at Çadir Höyük and also serves as field director. Her research focuses on domestic architecture and spatial analysis in prehistoric settlements.