ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the household archaeology field and methodologies that allow archaeologists to define household socioeconomic pursuits. It also describes socio-economy and examining methods to determine sociopolitical ranking across households, as well as more socially based questions about gender, religion, and ethnicity. In the last decade, in part with the florescence of micro-archaeological studies, household archaeology has become an important mainstay in the investigation of European and Near Eastern prehistoric and early historic settlements. Richard Wilk makes a distinction between a single dwelling unit and a household cluster, the latter housing separate groups that may all cooperate as a single unit. He uses ethnographic data from the Kekchi Maya to inform his model for identifying a household in the archaeological record. James Hardin, as Yoko Nishimura's, uses a similar methodology to determine the socioeconomic activities and family structure in the Levantine four-room house in Iron Age Israel.
