The living house

Abstract

In the winter of 1995–6, a Late Bronze Age house was excavated at Callestick in Cornwall (Jones 1998). This showed an interesting sequence of activities on its abandonment. First, the timber posts that had supported its roof were removed and the sockets of those at the centre of the building were filled with materials that included charcoal, pottery, quartz, and fragments of rubbing stones. The low stone wall that originally surrounded the structure was pushed into the interior of the building, and a series of quartz blocks were placed across the doorway, as if to prevent access. The roundhouse was then filled with a deposit of clay containing stone, charcoal, quartz, pottery, flint, and an inverted saddle quern. Parts of a large decorated jar were placed just left of the doorway. Finally, a ring of quartz stones was arranged around the edge of the building, inviting visual comparison with the funerary cairns of earlier centuries. This sequence of activities in many ways seems quite alien to us, for we have quite different experiences and understandings of house and home. The past two centuries have seen mass movements of people on an extraordinary scale as a result of war, urbanization, global differences in the distribution of wealth and opportunity, and a range of other factors. At the same time, dramatic social and political change has resulted in the perceived fragmentation of communities. All this has had a significant impact both on our relationship with the houses we live in, and on the concept of home itself (Allan and Crow 1989; Spain 1992; Birdwell-Pheasant and Lawrence-Zuniga 1999). Home may now be a transitory place, a state of mind evoked by the judicious arrangement of a few meaningful objects, but at the same time the idea of home remains highly emotive. High house prices in contemporary Britain and Ireland reflect the significance of the home in the cultivation of self-worth, emotional security, and social position. The materiality of the home evokes an aura of permanence in a world of change, acting as a lieu de mémoire in which ideas of personal and family history can be created.