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  • 13 - Houses and Time

  • Edited by J. A. Baird, Birkbeck College, University of London, April Pudsey, Manchester Metropolitan University
  • Book:
    Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World
    Published online:
    08 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022, pp 412-441

  • Summary

    One of the places where the disjuncture between the different qualities of written and material sources is perhaps most clear is in their temporal aspects. For example, ancient documents such as papyri were produced in a particular moment, within formal constraints of documentary practices. By contrast, the life cycles of houses tend to pivot around human – and less formal – scales of generational time: the biological life cycles of individual people and the life cycles of families. Archaeological houses hold the material memory of such cycles. This chapter examines the way the material form of the house can hold these different forms of time, and explores the way archaeological time can disrupt other ways of conceptualizing the past, for instance, in historical periodization. With specific reference to the houses of Dura-Europos in Arsacid and Roman Syria, the chapter questions the differing temporalities of the different forms of evidence and asks how these might be used together, avoiding the urge to force them to align, in order to paint a richer picture of ancient houses.