ABSTRACT
This volume shifts our attention from these canonical and monumental buildings to investigate the creativity, subtlety, and variability of common architecture and the people who built and dwelled in them. The chapters build on a long history of archaeological research that considers ordinary buildings, most notably settlement pattern studies, household archaeology, landscape studies, and investigations of the social uses of space. The contributions in this volume, however, more pointedly take ordinary architecture as their center of analysis and, in many cases, explicitly draw from vernacular architecture studies outside the field of archaeology as frameworks for thinking about how the everyday was pivotal in the making and meaning of social and cultural dynamics. In turn, this compilation advances the field of vernacular architecture by providing a deeper and more nuanced temporal perspective of common buildings.
