Houses of the Living: Domestic architecture in England and Wales, 4000-1500 BC

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 423

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REVIEW BY RACHEL BALLANTYNE

Fabulously comprehensive and systematic, this is primarily a resource assessment of later prehistoric structural footprints for homes – places of social reproduction, craft activities, food storage and consumption. Of note are the many composite illustrations that allow direct comparison of structural forms and sizes, and the ease of navigating the evidence by sub period and region. This is a rare occasion where the jigsaw of direct evidence is clearly laid out for the reader, while the character of prehistoric domestic lives is mostly left to the imagination: there are, for example, very few reconstruction images. What are the possibilities based on past woodworking technologies? The deep waters of the Circum-Alpine Neolithic pile-dwelling settlements preserve wooden doors and glimpses of walls and roofs, key architectural elements beyond post-holes, gullies or pits. Such limitations are understandable for a single-authored doctoral thesis and, regardless, this is a crucial synthesis of recent developer-funded discoveries alongside older, better-known examples.

Houses of the Living: Domestic architecture in England and Wales, 4000-1500 BC
Hannah Bullmore
BAR (£80)
ISBN 978-1407362014