3 English Houses, Materiality, and Everyday Life

Abstract

My previous work developed a structural model for understanding English vernacular houses, stressing the way the house reflected wider household values. In this paper, I balance this account by starting with everyday life rather than formal structure. I examine material traces of dwelling within and around the house, rather than the presumed mental template that conditioned its building. I discuss material items that flowed through the house in sometimes unpredictable and alarming ways (for example through witchcraft). These artifacts reflect gendered tensions and anxieties that ran through the rhythms of everyday life, rather than a patriarchal structure that governed them. A focus on dwelling brings into focus how the material form of the house and the social form of the household mutually created each other.

Archaeology of Everyday Life

“…The way houses communicate is not only through architecture, but also through interior spatial arrangements, exterior spaces, and household possessions. There is a mutually constituting relationship between the material form of a house and the social lives of its residents (e.g., Hutson 2010, Johnson 2015. Living and acting in a house turn a house into a home (e.g., Chesson Moore 2012).…”

Eternal love locked in an embrace and sealed with a ring: A Xianbei couple's joint burial in North Wei era, China (386–534 CE)

“…Emotion, such as happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger, is important in shaping human behavior by affecting people's actions and motivation (Ekman, 1999). Johnson (2015) argues that the material world is continually shaped and mediated through emotions, including ideas, beliefs, and cultural attitudes. Emotion can be materialized through words on the scripts, textiles, or ornaments, which could be defined as evidence of communication and intensification of emotion.…”