This document is part of the online version of the book Amheida II: A Late Romano-Egyptian House in the Dakhla Oasis / Amheida House B2 by Anna Lucille Boozer, which is available at http://dlib.nyu.edu/awdl/isaw/amheida-ii-house-b2/. It is published as part of the NYU Library's Ancient World Digital Library and in partnership with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). Further information about ISAW's publication program is available on the ISAW website. Please note that while the base URI of this publication is stable, the exact content available at that address is likely to change over time.
DOMESTIC ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ROMANO-EGYPTIAN HOUSE
An Integrated Research Agenda
Anna Lucille Boozer
Introduction
This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis, between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and 2010 (Figure 1.1, Figure 1.2).1 This report presents and discusses the architecture, artifacts, and ecofacts recovered from B2 in a holistic manner, which has never before been attempted in a full report on the excavation of a Romano-Egyptian house. The primary aim of this volume is to combine an architectural and material-based study with an explicitly contextual and theoretical analysis. In so doing, I hope to develop a methodology and present a case study of how the rich material remains of Romano-Egyptian houses may be used to investigate the relationship between domestic remains and social identity.↩#p22
Amheida is located in the northwestern part of the Dakhla Oasis, deep within Egypt’s Western Desert. Amheida has a long occupational history, and it reached its greatest size under Roman rule (approximately first through fourth centuries CE) (Figure 1.3). The occupants left behind a wealth of documentary, pictorial, architectural, and material data, and the favorable desert conditions have preserved these remains to a high degree.↩#p23
Amheida, known as Trimithis during the Roman Period, contains a diverse range of structure types within different sectors of the Roman city. The site is dominated by a large hill surmounted by a temple that was built and rebuilt over many centuries. From the surface, as well as limited excavations, it appears that elite houses lie to the south and east of the temple mound. A necropolis, with at least two pyramid tombs, extends to the southeast and south of the city. House B2 is located in the northeast sector of the city, which is composed of domestic and industrial structures. Extensive agricultural fields, predynastic lithic scatters, and Old Kingdom ceramics surround the built areas of the city. These remains of earlier periods attest to long-standing activity at Amheida before the Roman occupation of Egypt. Currently, it is neither clear what this pre-Roman settlement looked like nor how it developed over time.↩#p24
Research Framework
The present study contributes to the growing corpus of data on Romano-Egyptian daily life. In particular, this volume contributes a holistic analysis of a single house (B2) in order to reveal the material components of Romano-Egyptian daily life for a single household. Romano-Egyptian domestic archaeology is still in the early stages of development, despite a long history of domestic excavation in Egypt.↩#p25
Figure 1.1: Map of Egypt (M. Matthews).
Most prior research on Romano-Egyptian domestic contexts has taken place in Egypt’s Fayum (Figure 1.1). This region became a nexus for domestic studies due to the papyrological rescue missions led by Grenfell and Hunt in the early 1900s. These missions exposed numerous, well-preserved houses in the area.2 Because the primary objective of these missions was to salvage papyri, the resultant publications lack contextual and architectural data. In addition to Grenfell and Hunt’s rescue missions, other excavations took place in the Fayum, although the robustness of the data concerning them varies considerably.↩#p26
Figure 1.2: Map of the Great Oasis (M. Matthews).
The University of Michigan excavated two of the most famous Fayum sites in the early twentieth century: Karanis (Kom Aushim) (1924–1934) and Soknopaiou Nesos (Dime) (1931–1932). The material recovered from these sites is invaluable for the present study since both sites produced a wealth of material data on domestic architecture and artifacts. Karanis has become the type-site of Romano-Egyptian domestic architecture, due to its good state of preservation and the care with which it was excavated compared to previous work on Romano-Egyptian houses. Since the 1930s, Karanis has appeared in numerous publications as a representative Romano-Egyptian settlement.↩#p27
There are two major caveats that must be kept in mind when employing Karanis houses for comparanda.3 First, the Karanis houses have not been fully published. General reports on the stratigraphy, topography, and architecture were published in the 1930s, but these lacked full analyses of each structure and did not attempt to interpret the findings.4 A subsequent report attempted to fill in the gaps left by these prior publications, but it did not provide contextual explorations of the material, and the accompanying maps and illustrations are difficult to connect to particular structures and moments in time.5 Over the years, specialist publications on particular categories of material and of exhibitions have appeared.6 Unfortunately, we still do not have a full publication that provides the architectural layout of most of the Karanis houses. Moreover, only the largest and best-preserved houses were singled out for publication, making it difficult to discern the range of house types available at Karanis.7 This selectivity obscures the most common houses occupied by typical households at Karanis.↩#p28
Figure 1.3: Amheida site map.
Second, the publications that do exist for Karanis houses analyzed material categories rather than contexts (e.g. individual houses). Nearly twenty years ago, Peter van Minnen, a papyrologist, urged archaeologists to explore Karanis domestic material by context rather than by material category.8 Unfortunately, this type of analysis has not been accomplished for more than a tiny portion of this site yet. To date, it is impossible to connect artifacts to the houses from which they came, except by consultation of the excavation records held in the Kelsey Museum. It is not possible to determine which types of objects, texts, and architectural features co-occurred with one another and what the distribution of house types, objects, and texts looked like across the site.↩#p29
Figure 1.4: Karanis, plan IV, section G 11 in Boak, A. E. R. and E. E. Peterson, (1931). Karanis: Topographical and Architectural Report of the Excavations during the Seasons 1924-28. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
With these caveats in mind, it is possible to make some general statements about the houses excavated at Karanis. Generally, buildings at Karanis aligned into blocks of habitation (Figure 1.4).9 Although hundreds of buildings were excavated, only a few were described and drawn. The following description is reliant upon this published data, which may be revised with additional exploration of the site. These published houses were predominantly made of mud brick with only small amounts of wood used.10 Flat roofs were common, except in cellars, which were vaulted. Most houses were elongated and had multiple stories, with cooking taking place in courtyards that were either private or shared (Figure 1.5). The walls were often plastered and covered with a thin lime wash. A black wash was most common with white accents painted horizontally across the mud brick courses. Decorations were minimal and were usually found in niches, often representing religious scenes, and typically painted in maroon and black.11↩#p30
Figure 1.5: Karanis, Plan 25, Floor plan of House C42 in Husselman, E. M. (1979). Karanis Excavations of the University of Michigan in Egypt, 1928-1935: Topography and Architecture: A Summary of the Reports of the Director, Enoch E. Peterson. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
The University of Michigan also excavated houses at Soknopaiou Nesos, but the results of this mission were not fully published.12 Only the coins, papyri, and specific architectural elements received attention in the single published excavation report.13 The houses appear to have been built contiguously, and each had a courtyard to support domestic cooking needs (Figure 1.6). These structures were built directly onto bedrock. The largest house excavated had an internal courtyard (aithrion). All of the structures had a central-pillared stairway leading to upper floor(s) and often also to cellars. Poor quality wall paintings were found in some of the structures.14↩#p31
Figure 1.6: Soknopaiou Nesos, plan III, ground plan, late first level, east side in Boak A. E. R. et al (1935). Soknopaiou Nesos: The University of Michigan Excavations at Dimê in 1931-32. Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan.
Other sites from Egypt’s Fayum region are even less well documented. Hawara, located at the entrance to the Fayum, is a particularly important site for Roman Egypt, although it perhaps is best-known for the pyramid of Amenemhat III (12th Dynasty). Uytterhoeven’s recent volume provides an excellent compendium of Hawara data.15 Sadly, little can be made of the ruinous Romano-Egyptian domestic remains, except that they seem to have a square or rectangular footprint averaging less than 100 m² in area and with an adjoining exterior courtyard. These houses seem to have been multistoried, with only two or three rooms on the ground floor.16↩#p32
Another Fayum site, Tebtynis (modern Tell Umm el-Baragat), also had Greco-Roman occupation. Tebtynis provides domestic comparanda for the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, although there are significantly fewer published houses from Tebtynis than Karanis and Soknopaiou Nesos. Most Tebtynis houses date to late Ptolemaic and early Roman Periods, and the published plans show houses with a square plan. One house has a peristyle contained within the house.17 These other Fayum houses also were analyzed typologically, so it is not possible to connect finds, architectural features, and the plans of houses in order to reconstruct what each individual house looked like.18↩#p33
Moving to other regions in Egypt, we find a different range of fragmentary data on Romano-Egyptian houses. Oxyrhynchus (modern el-Bahnasa) is located approximately 160 km south of modern Cairo. Oxyrhynchus provides us with a wealth of papyri dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, revealing remarkable detail about the community that once resided there. The urban layout, domestic structures, and material remains also are described, although the amount of archaeological publication is paltry.19 Other areas of Upper Egypt, such as Elephantine, have produced houses. Elephantine is an island in the middle of the Nile as part of modern-day Aswan in southern Egypt. Unfortunately the results of the urban excavations are difficult to interpret because only portions of the domestic structures have been exposed.20↩#p34
Moving to the north coast of Egypt, we find several examples of Roman Mediterranean housing. Alexandria, the premier city in Roman Egypt—and one of the chief cities of the Roman Empire—is poorly visible to the archaeologist today. Even so, archaeologists have begun to recover the remains of villas and other elaborate housing structures that potentially contained workshops and apartments in a single structure.21 These structures have not been holistically explored, such that we could understand the architecture, artifacts, ecofacts, and textual data as a unit. This analytical problem entails that the way in which these individual structures were used in antiquity is ambiguous.↩#p35
Marina el-Alamein (ancient Leukaspis or Antiphrae), a smaller coastal Graeco-Roman port town west of Alexandria, produced several sumptuous dwellings. These houses contained a central court surrounded by two or three portico wings, while the smaller dwellings had just one wing of a single column. Typologically, these houses recall portico and peristyle houses.22 To date, these houses have not been fully published, and the preliminary reports do not include a holistic analysis of the material.↩#p36
Egypt’s Western Desert contains a wealth of well-preserved domestic remains. The Kharga Oasis, east of Dakhla, has produced partial data on houses. Ancient Kysis (Douch), located at the extreme southern edge of the oasis, contains a large number of domestic structures. Architecturally, these houses reflect Roman Mediterranean influences, as can be seen particularly in the use of inner peristyles and interior courts.23 Unfortunately, the recovered domestic data is not always clear, and we do not have a full range of portable and architectural material to reconstruct life in the contextual manner that we seek.↩#p37
Kellis (Ismant el-Kharab) provides an abundance of data on local Dakhla domestic life.24 The site drew attention from early travelers in the nineteenth century and archaeologists in the twentieth century. Kellis has undergone modern excavation since 1986, under the direction of Colin Hope as part of the Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP). The site appears to have been occupied from the first to fourth centuries CE and occupies an area of 1050 x 650 m. The project has produced numerous preliminary reports on the excavated houses, although a final excavation report has not been published yet; it is intended that this final report will be fully contextual. At this stage, it is possible to summarize the Kellis houses on the basis of the preliminary reports.↩#p38
Roman Kellis domestic architecture usually consisted of a single-story structure with barrel vaulted roofs. A staircase provided access to the roof, which was often used as additional work and storage space. Within the house, there was typically a central courtyard area surrounded by living and workspaces, although some houses had rear courtyards in addition to or instead of the central courtyard. Walls were mud-plastered and often contained strips of whitewash along rear walls and around doorways and wall niches.25 Presumably this whitewash illuminated these dark spaces, particularly when lamps were placed in the niches.↩#p39
A closer examination of the Kellis houses yields diachronic information on Dakhla house development.26 Area B, in northern-central Kellis, primarily consists of extensive complexes. Area B dates from the first through third centuries CE and shows a continuous development of buildings, some of which were more formal than others. A sub-area contained within this zone, Kellis Area B3, contained lavishly decorated houses with bright geometric motifs. The B3 sub-area contains a series of large residences that may be contemporaneous since they all share a north wall.27 Hope suggests that these Kellis residences contain architectural parallels to Roman atrium houses at Italian sites such as Pompeii, rather than drawing upon Egyptian architectural norms.28↩#p40
House B/3/1, located in the eastern portion of Area B, has finds largely dating to the late first to early third centuries CE. House B/3/1 has a more Classical style layout than is commonly associated with Egypt. House B/3/1 has a clustered plan of access and a central open area (room 1b).29 The organizing principle for this house was bifurcated around two rooms rather than around one room, which may have been an attribute of wealthier Dakhlan houses.30↩#p41
Area C is located in the far eastern extremity of Kellis and contains blocks of structures as well as a visible furnace and kiln debris. The Area C structures date to the second and third centuries CE. These Area C buildings drew upon Classical models in their arrangement, as indicated by the placement of living and workspaces around a central open courtyard. Kellis House C/2/8 has a square plan, and the rooms were arranged around a central open courtyard. From the surface, Kellis House C/2/10 shares a similar square plan and central open courtyard, but it has not been fully excavated, and reconstructions must be tentative at this time.31↩#p42
Moving to the western portion of Kellis, known as Area A, we find churches, a bath house, and domestic structures. This area of the site is located just east of a cluster of temples, a church, and the western tombs. Hope’s team excavated a cluster of houses in Area A. The Kellis Area A houses are single-story elongated structures dating to the late third to fourth century.32 Houses from this area contain well-preserved barrel vaulted roofs over the rooms that surround a central open courtyard. House 3 has a central, open court (room 6) around which the unroofed stairs (room 7) and main barrel-vaulted living quarters (rooms 2–5, 8–10) clustered.33 Likewise, House 5 in Area A/9 dates to the fourth century, is somewhat elongated, has a central room through which other rooms were accessed, and all of the rooms were barrel vaulted.34 The final publication of the SE Kellis houses promises to be a groundbreaking publication. Interested readers should consult Hope’s forthcoming volume for the definitive results on these structures when it becomes available.↩#p43
In sum, we have a considerable amount of information about houses from the first to fourth centuries from various parts of Egypt. This information is largely architectural, however, and most previous publications of Romano-Egyptian house excavations segregated artifacts and architectural elements from their original contexts, with the result that only general statements can be made about domestic assemblages. In other words, the specificity of daily lives within individual households was lost in the drive to categorize the finds.35 As a result of these methodological and analytical practices, we can say very little about how individual households functioned over time, in different socio-economic groups, ethnic groups, regions, and so on. Moreover, we do not have a sufficient range of plans for excavated houses, which makes it difficult to determine the geographic spread, diachronic development, and prevalence of various house types.↩#p44
Moving from this fragmented picture to a detailed, nuanced, and contextual analysis will require the fuller publication of older excavations as well as fully published new excavations. The final publications of the Kellis domestic structures and of House B1 at Amheida will be of great value in this effort. The present work contributes to this agenda by engaging more deeply with the intersection of domestic architecture and material culture. This engagement will enable me to reconstruct in part the life of one Romano-Egyptian household, which will catalyze new research questions for domestic archaeology. Prior research on Romano-Egyptian houses facilitated the present study and offers background for increasingly refined perspectives in future work. Since archaeological research entails the creation and study of archives, a variety of perspectives on Romano-Egyptian domestic life is possible and even desirable.36 Rather than attempting to supplant previous work on Romano-Egyptian houses, the current project represents another layer of engagement with the data and makes use of previous archaeological scholarship in order to answer new questions about domestic life.↩#p45
Archaeological Approaches to Houses
Households are the result of interactions between larger social forms and individuals.37 In order to capture this relationship, it is necessary to retain the household as a distinct unit of analysis. Recent cross-cultural advances in domestic archaeology provide useful avenues for exploring Romano-Egyptian houses. Most of these developments rely on contextual approaches to domestic material.38 By gathering together images, objects, beings, settings, and activities, it is possible to gain a holistic understanding of daily life. Recent theorists argue that analyzing artifacts and architecture as isolated entities places too much emphasis on form and phasing to the detriment of social questions.39 By contrast, if we recover detailed artifact assemblages from a small number of houses, we can determine activity patterns and test our interpretations of artifacts found in other contexts.40 In Roman Egypt, we do not have a detailed understanding of domestic artifact assemblages within their physical environments. This deficiency hinders our ability to reconstruct social life within houses.↩#p46
Hendon highlights four facets of social archaeology that should be explored within houses: (1) the materiality of the domestic structures; (2) the nature of day-to-day experiences and practices rather than function alone; (3) the variability of houses; and (4) the importance of understanding social processes at different social scales.41 These four proposals give us a useful roadmap for domestic archaeology and are worth exploring in more detail.↩#p47
First, the materiality of domestic space requires special attention in order to understand object meanings. Penelope Allison argued that contextualized analyses bring architecture, material culture, and texts to bear upon questions of social life, object meanings, and our understanding of antiquity.42 Allison’s contextual analyses of material culture from Pompeii showed that scholars have often mislabeled objects and misunderstood how they were used in their original spatio-temporal locus.43 These erroneous attributions were replicated over more than a century of research upon these houses, creating multiple levels of misunderstanding. Allison’s work unmistakably illustrates that contextual analyses are essential for understanding domestic material culture.↩#p48
There are additional advantages to contextual archaeology. A contextual approach enables us to formulate logical conclusions about the types of objects or objects and architecture that tend to co-occur.44 A focus on materiality informs archaeologists about the life histories of objects—their creation, use, reuse, and eventual discard. Despite some excellent studies from other areas of the Roman Empire, there exists very little published work on the contextual usage of Romano-Egyptian domestic material. The present study addresses this lacuna through contextually exploring the material data as well as examining the material culture thematically and typologically.↩#p49
Second, a room-by-room analysis of houses, exploring the architecture and artifact assemblages in tandem, approximates how individuals experienced space within the house. This analytical approach avoids descriptive shorthand for rooms and recognizes that houses and the people who live in them are in a “mutually constituting” relationship.45 In other words, individuals shaped the space around them to represent their needs and social outlook. In turn, the architectural space influenced individual life perspectives by providing the arena for daily activities.↩#p50
It is well understood that most ancient houses had multi-use rooms. For example, numerous ancient sources indicate that Romans moved furniture around their houses with a high frequency. Pliny refers to rooms serving multiple functions depending on the arrangement of portable objects and furniture.46 In palatial houses one may have been able to codify space to a higher degree than small properties, because large spaces did not require the high degree of flexibility and malleability that small houses necessitated. It is more challenging to interpret spatial usage in modest houses, such as Amheida House B2, than in more sprawling estates.47 One can imagine that the use of space in small structures would change throughout the course of the day or the season, depending on who used the space and other conditions such as light, heat, wind, and so on.48 In order to interpret household functions appropriately, we must remain flexible when assigning labels to different spaces.↩#p51
Rapoport suggests that we view spatial organization in terms of systems of activities that take place in systems of settings.49 A setting includes permanent frameworks (architecture), semi-permanent features (ovens, furniture), and also transient features (people, objects) and their associated activities.50 Activities may take place at different times, follow different sequences, and involve different people. The “label” of a room may change depending upon who is involved, what they are doing, and when it occurs. Some of these activities may have been actively considered and performed, while others may have been routine and unanalyzed by those involved.51 An avoidance of descriptive shorthand terms, such as “kitchen,” refocuses our attention on activities, individuals, and patterns.↩#p52
Some scholars have argued that it is impossible to fully understand societies through artifact distributions, because the modern observer is unable to determine if an object was used or stored in a given area.52 Although rooms are often multi-use, artifact distributions are not meaningless. We may not be able to determine the full range of household activities that took place over time, but we can capture specific slices of time within this range. Moreover, at this time, we do not have enough contextual studies to validate the claim that object locations are not informative. As we accumulate more contextual studies from reliable contexts, we may be able to evaluate the security of a context for meaningful contextual analyses beyond the binary of sealed contexts and open/disturbed contexts. It is also worth considering the possibility that even disturbed contexts, though individually difficult to rely on, may collectively yield more reliable information. At this time, scholars of the Roman Empire suggest that contextual analyses are relevant for determining object meanings and spatial significance in a variety of structures, and it is worthwhile exploring this approach in Roman Egypt.53↩#p53
Third, household variability can be recognized only when we analyze houses as distinct units. In order to understand social and functional domestic differences between houses we must gather information on which domestic elements co-occur. Contextual approaches to houses enable us to account for social variations rather than impose normative perspectives upon past lifestyles. It is likely that individuals made use of houses and material objects in diverse ways rather than following a codified practice.54 A contextual approach to archaeological material will help us to discern patterns within domestic diversity without smoothing over the disparities.↩#p54
Fourth, social processes look different depending upon the analytical scale. By examining a single house in detail, it is possible to explore the connection between the microscale of the house and the macroscale of Roman Empire. The household is the social institution most often invoked when considering social change and social difference at the microscale. Microscale analyses help to explain how change occurs, what form it takes, and what its consequences are in minute detail.55 The way in which individuals understood imported imperial objects and ideas can change the meaning and use of these objects and concepts. Through examining the ways that individuals understood the Roman Empire, we can understand the extent to which a locality experienced change under broader social trends.↩#p55
In sum, this project employs a contextual approach to House B2 in order to retain the household unit. This approach will enable a better understanding of the material culture, architecture, occupants, and social niche than studies that isolate specific categories of material for analysis. The rigorous methodological processes involved in contextual archaeology ensure that the data can be re-analyzed and re-interpreted, allowing for malleability in interpretation after excavation is complete.56 The method of excavation and documentation is essential to this kind of study. The lack of rigorous methodologies in many other excavations—old and recent—is the foundation of incomplete domestic publications. The accuracy of excavation and of its documentation enables us to study contexts and objects together and within different perspectives. The excavation proper contains a method and a theory, not only the interpretation of what has been found.↩#p56
The holistic concept is recent, and most Romano-Egyptian domestic excavations are outdated and were not excavated stratigraphically. By emphasizing careful practice, I recognize that archaeological research changes. Future researchers will ask different questions of our data.57 Naturally, a contextual approach does not mean setting aside the systematic publication of material finds; rather, it requires looking at those finds both as members of a class and as parts of a context.↩#p57
Choice of Amheida House B2
House B2 is situated in an area of the site (Area 1) that contains vernacular mud brick architecture alongside industrial structures and utilitarian ceramics on the surface (Figure 1.7). It is located across the street from a structure that the DOP had investigated previously. This other structure appears to have had a similar plan to B2 and may have been converted from a house into a ceramics workshop at some stage of its occupational history. The DOP team found large quantities of clinker as well as unbaked fragments of ceramics, high densities of sherds, and large numbers of unfired vessels around Kiln 1 within the house.58↩#p58
Figure 1.7: Plan of Amheida Area 1 showing B2 and surrounding structures.
During the Roman period and in prior phases of Egyptian history, people considered the ceramics profession to be low on the social scale. Workshops and kilns were usually situated on the outskirts of settlements. This placement both gave potters privileged access to clay and also kept the production fumes away from domestic quarters.59 Based upon these considerations, I surmised that the dwellings in the vicinity of the ceramics workshop were not particularly desirable or high status and that houses would reflect a mid-low economic stratum of society. Since we wanted to understand this economic stratum as well as the richer social level responsible for House B1, a house excavated from 2004–2008, all signs suggested that House B2 would be suitable for our goals. Prior knowledge from Hope’s study of the ceramic production areas in the immediate vicinity of B2 also provided an important incentive for working on this structure.↩#p59
Moreover, I chose House B2 for this study because, from the surface, it appeared to be a medium-sized house in a square plan (11 x 11 m or 121 m²) (Figure 1.8). All of the walls were clearly visible and the structure appeared to be in a reasonable state of preservation. These preservation and size attributes were important, as we wanted to recover sufficient data to reconstruct daily life for a family of modest means.↩#p60
Figure 1.8: Plan of House B2 (N. Warner).
Specific Research Objectives
This report has two primary goals for House B2. First, it will offer a comprehensive presentation and evaluation of the architectural and material evidence recovered from House B2 and its surroundings. This report pursues a material ethnography of the individuals who once occupied a single house in Roman Egypt, aiming to illuminate the settings in which their lives took place along with the objects that held meaning for them. The second goal of this report is to relate evidence recovered from B2 to the spectrum of domestic evidence previously recovered from Roman Egypt. In so doing, this report builds on previous archaeological scholarship and contributes a new vantage point on this material.↩#p61
The specific research objectives are as follows:↩#p62
Establish the chronology of B2
Fit B2 within the Romano-Egyptian domestic spectrum
Determine socio-spatial contexts, activities, and practices
Determine the people who occupied B2
Determine relationships to the Roman Empire
These specific objectives will help me achieve the broader research objectives for this volume.↩#p63
Volume Structure
My objective for this volume is to return the excavated materials to the contexts that they came from rather than considering them in isolation or only as part of specific material categories. The chapter divisions form the foundation for the ways in which I interpret the use of objects and the function of spaces in subsequent chapters.↩#p64
Chapter 2 introduces the Dakhla Oasis and Amheida, including the cultural history of these areas and the research history upon them. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the research methodologies employed in the project. Chapter 4 provides a room-by-room analysis of the house, discussing the architecture, artifact assemblages, and stratigraphy holistically. Chapter 5 examines the construction techniques used to build B2, the street, and exterior courtyard. Chapter 6 compares the architecture of B2 to that of other Romano-Egyptian houses and suggests a potential reconstruction. Chapter 7 provides a thematic overview of the small finds from House B2 in order to crosscut material divisions between objects, while chapters 8 through 19 examine individual categories of material. Chapter 20 of this volume returns to the specific research objectives enumerated above and considers some of the social questions raised by in this project in order to explore the family who once occupied this structure. A more thorough exploration of the theoretical questions explored here, as well as a broader comparison of domestic structures and what they can tell us about social change under imperialism, is reserved for a later volume.60 A comprehensive chart of the object distributions can be found in Chapter 20 (Figure 20.1). Additional information about the stratigraphic units (DSUs, FSUs) can be found by consulting the open-access database.↩#p65
Terminology and Abbreviations
The specific archaeological terminology used throughout this volume is as follows:↩#p66
Deposition Stratigraphic Unit (DSU) is a 3-dimensional unit that defines the borders of a deposition from which finds are collected. The borders of a DSU can be determined by the presence of one or more architectural features, the borders of the deposition itself, or an arbitrary division of space on the basis of decisions made during excavation.↩#p67
Feature Stratigraphic Unit (FSU) denotes an architectural, man-made feature such as a wall, pit, oven, or floor. The borders are determined by the visible extent of the feature.↩#p68
Stratigraphic Unit Quantification (SUQ) refers to a form completed by the ceramicist and the registrar in order to quantify the number and weight of objects belonging to DSUs. Only the diagnostic objects are kept and recorded in more detail.↩#p69
Notes
1 This report is the first excavation report of the Amheida Project and the second volume in the Amheida series.
3 Davoli summarizes the work at Karanis as well as some of the issues with the University of Michigan methodologies and publication practices (1998:73-116). Wilfong 2012 discusses the significance of the unpublished Karanis archives, and Boozer (2015a) argues that Karanis houses have become overly-dominant as a typology in Romano-Egyptian archaeology.
6 Many of the objects from the excavations went to the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Some of the exhibition catalogues from the Kelsey museum include Gazda and Hessenbruch 1978, Thomas 2001. Specialist studies include, Haatveldt, Peterson and Husselman 1964, Harden 1936, Higashi 1990, Husselman 1952, Husselman 1953, Husselman 1971, Johnson 1981, Shier 1978, Yeivin 1934, Youtie and Pearl 1939, Youtie and Pearl 1944.
11 Ibid.:35-36, plates 18, 19a, 21b, 22a, 24a, 24b, 25, 102a. The unpublished archives may alter this understanding of Karanis decorative motifs (Wilfong 2012).
12 For an overview of this excavation as well as other archaeological research at Soknopaiou Nesos, see Davoli 1998:39-71.
17 Davoli 1998: 179-210, Hadji-Minaglou 2007, Hadji-Minaglou 1995. The peristyle house dates to approximately the 1 C BCE through the 1 C CE (Hadji-Minaglou 2008:126-127, fig. 4, Grimal 1995:590-591, fig 14).
18 For more on Fayum houses from additional sites, see Davoli 1998.
19 For an overview of the documentary and archaeological research at Oxyrhynchus, see papers in Bowman, Coles, Gonis, Obbink and Parsons 2007. More research upon the material remains from Oxyrhynchus certainly is possible and desirable.
20 The archaeologists have produced numerous well-analyzed reports, however, including Arnold, Haeny and Schaten 2003.
25 Hope, Kaper, Bowen and Patten 1989, Knudstad and Frey 1999.
26 See Boozer 2015b for an overview of house comparisons between Amheida, Kellis, and the Fayum.
27 Hope et al. 2006. This situation suggests formal planning, as can be seen in various areas at Amheida. Kellis Area C is most similar to Amheida Area 1, where there is a shared wall running across the northern extent of the south structures on the main road and a shared wall running across the southern extent of the north structures on the main road.
28 Hope 2006. On comparable Pompeiian houses, see Zanker 1998:135-156, 192-203.
29 Hope and Whitehouse 2006:31, Hope et al. 2006:23-31, Hope 2007a:33.
30 Compare to Amheida House B1 (Boozer 2007:132-133).
31 Area C at Kellis was a vernacular and industrial zone comparable to Area 1 at Amheida. Structures from Area C tend to be uniform in plan (Hope et al. 2006:2).
37 Cowgill 1993, Dobres and Robb 2000, Johnson 1989. For more on the relationship between houses and society, see Bourdieu 1966, Bachelard 1994, Donley-Reid 1990, Hillier and Hanson 1984.
38 The term “context” is a technical term within archaeology that traditionally refers to either the depositional or cultural environment of an artifact. Contextual archaeology extends the meaning of this term to include a vast network of relationships that endow an object with symbolic significance. Contextual archaeology is an epistemological approach originally defined and promoted by Ian Hodder during the 1980s (Hodder 1987, Hodder and Hutson 1991:121-155, Trigger 1989:348-357, Barrett 1987). This perspective underscores the belief that there is an interactive and profound relationship between material culture and society. In particular, material culture has a symbolic value that is important in itself. This symbolic value can disguise or reflect how we interpret the more obvious technical, economic, and social functions of the object. Symbolic values vary from situation to situation and archaeologists must interpret symbolic meaning within localized contexts. In other words, meaning is relational; the same object may evoke different meanings in different contexts (Hodder 1999:91).
41 On the four facets to explore the social archaeology of the house, see Hendon 2004. On domestic materiality, see Tringham 1994. On the variability of houses, see Hendon 1996. On the importance of understanding social processes on different social scales, see Tringham 1991.
44 Scholars have not conducted preliminary research to assemble corpora of material, and analyses of rich occupation debris are few and far between. We have no shortage of data for such studies, but scholars have not engaged in contextual analyses, even when excavating very rich sites, see Lavan, Swift and Putzeys 2007:3.
47 On flexibility of domestic space usage, see Perring 2002:11, Ellis 2000:59.
48 On household modifications during the day, see Harlow and Laurence 2001:27.
49 Rapoport 1990. Rapoport’s emphasis upon activities touches upon an archaeology of performance, which Ian Hodder defines as “a dimension of action that bridges to meaning and communication. Performance is an interpretation acted out for someone (including oneself). It is always, consciously or not, staged, and it is thus always theatrical (2006:85).” In other words, Hodder examines performance as both a private, daily activity and a monumental, public spectacle. I follow this comprehensive view of performance to highlight the physical daily practices within this house, since it connects meaning, ideology and identity with the immediacy of materiality.
51 On the distinction between practical and discursive consciousness, see Giddens 1984:181-183, 200.
52 Schiffer takes issue with the correspondence that Hodder ascribes to disposal practices and belief systems (1987:73-74). For a full discussion of abandonment and pitfalls in interpretations, see Chapter 20.
53 On Pompeiian houses, see Allison 1992, Allison 1993. On Sagalassos houses, see Putzeys, Van Thune, Poblome, Uytterhoeven, Waelkens and Degeest 2004. On Romano-British forts, see Hoffman 1995. On Romano-British town sites, see Fulford, Clarke and Eckardt 2006, Fulford and Clarke 2011. See also Cool 2002. On Amarna houses, see the numerous Kemp and Stevens publications, listed at http://www.amarnaproject.com/pages/publications/.
54 On diversity in object usage, see Allison 1999b:63.
56 The strength of a contextual approach is that practitioners recognize that archaeology deals with the creation and examination of an archive, see Lucas 2001:62-63, 213-214.
57 On the iterative nature of archaeology, see Deleuze 1994.
