Entering someone’s house uninvited is not to be taken lightly. However, I have done so on many occasions. In each case, the house itself had been abandoned for well over 2000 years, often as a result of fire damage.
One of the most unexpected intrusions came when we were excavating the Iron Age site town of Non Ban Jak in northeast Thailand to try to pin down the degree to which the community was structured with social inequality.
One way of finding this out is to look at where the people lived and what they owned. Towards the end of a day’s fieldwork, as I looked down into the excavation square, I began to make out faint straight lines.
Over the next few days, these turned out to be the rooms of two houses, divided by a narrow town lane.
The wall foundations were built of clay and the base of the wall posts were clearly visible, as were the structural remains of the wattle and daub.
Then came quite a surprise - we found three graves of the ancestors under the floor boards.
Many of the houses I have come across were very small and life must have been rather cramped.
Last week I mentioned the expansion of the first farmers to migrate into Europe from Anatolia and we know a great deal about their houses from miniature house models.
One of these was placed as a foundation offering under the floor of a house at the site of Zarkou in Thessaly. It is well-known for its rare insight on the structure of a farming family who lived there about 7500 years ago.
There are two rooms, one of which contains an oven with a loaf of bread next to it. Eight tiny human clay figurines seem to sleep, an adult couple, a slightly younger couple and the rest, children or infants.
The conclusion is that each house in this community was occupied by an extended family.
Further north, in Hungary, complete villages have been excavated, and the houses, measuring about 8mx5m, were crowded together within defensive palisades and ditches. Over the centuries, houses were replaced and the sites accumulated to depths of up to 10m.
That sequence takes a bit of unravelling.
