ABSTRACT
Hundreds of four-room houses are known today from Iron Age sites throughout the Land of Israel, from the Galilee to the Negev highlands, and from the Transjordanian plateau to western Samaria, and even to the coastal plain. The houses first appear during the Iron Age I, usually in an irregular form, but quickly crystallized into the well-known three- and four-room house forms that characterize them until they disappear in the late Iron Age. The four-room house and its subtypes the three- and five-room houses have been discussed intensively in archaeological literature. The functional analysis of daily life within the four-room house, best exemplified by the seminal studies of Stager and Holladay, is based first and foremost on ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data. Two implications of this analysis to be illuminated below, together with other factors, are potentially of great importance for the present study; they involve an egalitarian ideology, and a concept termed 'purity and space syntax'.
