ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine the influence of a key tenet of Wilk and Rathje’s model (1982) on contemporary investigations of domestic settlement. Specifically, I question the assumption made by the authors that separates domestic personnel structure from domestic activity structure. Wilk and Rathje isolate household activity from household personnel because of their concern with how to approach these analytical units in the material record. However, in downplaying the importance of domestic personnel structure for the study of archaeological households, and by extension for other domestic units, Wilk and Rathje unwittingly construct a situation in which such details are not critically evaluated in the explicit formulation of archaeological approaches to domestic groups. While this division may be valuable from a methodological standpoint, it encourages prehistorians to rely on implicitly constructed
social formations with which to interpret the personnel structure of archaeological domestic groups. These analogies find their base in a circular logic which predicates the identification and interpretation of habitational remains on the existence and location of particular familial forms, most commonly the nuclear family. Despite disclaimers to the contrary in Wilk and Rathje (1982) and elsewhere (e.g. Ashmore & Wilk 1988; Santley & Hirth 1993b), in practice, these groups remain the basis for archaeological reconstructions of domestic activity structure and settlement (Doyel 1987; Bawden 1990; Aldenderfer 1994; Rogers & Smith 1995). By default, these social analogues generally correspond to groups that mirror contemporary Western and androcentric norms. The problems inherent in this division are magnified by the application of ethnographic cases to prehistoric ones in which a similar uncritical eye has been applied to the nature of domestic group relationships (e.g. Fortes 1958).
