ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the home may function as the symbolic container of families or groups of people who identify themselves as related through a house-based association. It also reviews methods used to identify what family, kinship, and marriage structures might have existed in an ancient community. The chapter focuses on several archaeological studies that seek to identify the presence of house societies in ancient communities. It also explains that several anthropological ethnographies profiling living house society's offers insight into the relationship between the symbolic and the physical house. Houses in traditional Tanimbar dwellings held ancestor altars or tavu, sometimes consisting only of a shelf with a few items. Among the Tanimbar culture of eastern Indonesia, Susan McKinnon has found another semi-permanent physical attribute of a house society, an altar. Nonetheless, there are some architectural clues that might lead an archaeologist to speculate that an ancient culture was organized according to Levi-Straussian house-society principles.
