Everyday Climates: Household Archaeologies and the Politics of Scale

Abstract

The small scale is recognized as a necessary rebuttal to macroscalar narratives of climate–society relationships in the past, and archeologists and historians have increasingly turned to advocating smaller and shorter scales of analysis and interpretation, from “microclimates” to interannual droughts and single settlement histories. Such provocations rightly caution against the dangers of oversimplification and determinism in recent planetary or Earth-systems approaches to human history, as well as push scholars to acknowledge human-scale experiences: weather, seasonality, landscape change. When it comes to smaller-scale remains, however, like those of household practices, we often consider them data or proxies that validate larger-scale arguments about societal persistence or economic vulnerability. Yet the material and ideational ways that people in premodern worlds made sense of their surroundings, especially via gendered and class-based rhythms of production and consumption, were deeply entwined in the politics of everyday household life. What would a household archeology of climate entail? In this paper I highlight how households themselves were critical sites of environmental construction, experience and history-making through a selection of examples of archeological work from the Mediterranean. I argue that archeologists can critically rethink themes of persistence and adaptation by taking seriously the scalar constructions and varied politics of domestic life.

1. Introduction

Climate change feels big. We recognize, to begin, that climate is a complex process whose interlocking dynamics and variables of atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial and biotic components operate at large scales. While we often acknowledge that humans primarily experience climatic changes through weather, by perceiving transitions in expected norms and intimately engaging with shifting conditions of temperature or precipitation, we naturally turn to the bigger, regional and even global idea of climate to make sense of things [1,2]. When we then move to study premodern environments, that big scale, both temporal and spatial, seems fitting and even necessary, given the often coarse and widely varying records we have to reconstruct and interpret past environments. As archeologists, we speak most confidently in terms of societal relationships to climate, through structural forces like subsistence economies, institutions, migration practices, settlements or cultural ideas of nature. We tend to seek out diachronic patterns and regional variations in evidence that can provide comparative information on the impacts of climatic or environmental changes and how human societies might have responded differently across time and space.

A big-scale approach to premodern environmental or climatic history has therefore stuck, as historians and archeologists have turned to examining ancient human–climate interactions and to the recognition that environmental records are key to more robust interpretations of historical transformation [3,4]. Shifts in historiographical conversations lend support to this larger focus—globalizing, deep or even planetary history has gained standing for its ability to synchronize varying complicated sets of data to narrate diachronic processes of societal growth and decline, topics clearly, even obviously, relevant today [5]. In new fields like the “history of climate and society,” for example, scholars advocate analyses that integrate multiple kinds of natural proxies and historical and material evidence to reveal the complexities of past responses to and interventions in environmental changes [6]. The uneven resolution of many natural records, as well as the challenges of seeking out significant patterns from complex background noise, often attenuate our focus to centuries-long or millennia-long transformations. Despite these issues, these studies are clearly attractive for their apparent complexity in analyzing coupled human–nature systems [7,8]. In that vein, systems theory is re-emerging in archeological studies of societal persistence and adaptation, as recent work in resilience and sustainability studies shows [9,10,11]. Scholars acknowledge the risks of thinking big in recent planetary or Earth-systems approaches to human history—reductionism and overgeneralization, even determinism—but advocate the heuristic power of these frameworks, based on the records we have, e.g., [4]. Climate change in the past, then, can still feel big.

Efforts to descend beneath graphs of global atmospheric concentrations of carbon or regional surveys of data to think about people’s real, lived or even imagined experiences with climatic or environmental change would seem, then, important to complementing this macroscalar analytical bent ([12,13], see also [2]). Archeologists have certainly called out the poor resolution of some proxies, as opposed to records such as tree rings or speleothems, as well as the lack of people in many big environmental histories, the multiple and often incommensurate scales of practice that forged human–climate relationships and the nuanced, nonlinear realities of the impacts of droughts, floods or other phenomena on premodern life [13,14,15]. For the ancient Mediterranean, for example, we are increasingly more aware of modeling the effects of acute droughts of 2–3 years on rainfed agriculture, as opposed to the potential longer-term impacts of regional trends in aridity [16]. Often, attempts to integrate multiscalar investigations of human–environment relationships circle around the measure of social hierarchies and macropolitical change—ruling elites or state institutions, on one side, and masses of populations on the other [17,18]. It is more challenging, based on the available evidence and methods, to reach other scales of environmental and climatic histories: villages, communities, household networks and families [19].

Yet the household was the center of life in premodern and preindustrial sedentary societies throughout the Mediterranean, the regional focus of this paper. Indeed, up to the onset of industrialization, the household unit—typically defined as a kin-based, co-residential collective but not necessarily a nuclear family, given that their construction was historically and culturally contingent—was a crucially important site of production, consumption and the management of energy flows between people and larger collectives [20,21]. It is for this reason, for example, that archeologists turn to long-term comparative analyses of household size to study phenomena like inequality from the past to the present [22]. Beyond resource or wealth accumulation, where people lived and worked conditioned their understandings, perceptions and imaginations of landscapes, environments and senses of climate [12,23]. Even with Western industrialization during the 18th and 19th centuries CE, as recent work is showing, relationships between energy consumption and climate change can be traced to domestic needs around coal and the choices and decisions that changed daily life, directed economic strategies and redesigned the home [24]. It seems important to forward an archeology of the household-scale practices that mediated people’s experiences of shifting conditions through their norms, ideas and decisions relating to resources, landscapes, weather and climate. In other words, to think critically about how past people “domesticated” their environments, by examining how they established ideas and expectations of climate through everyday activities and understandings of social orders operating at shorter rhythms and place-based scales [1,25,26]. I argue this not to rebalance our macroscalar investigations by prioritizing only the microscale as a way to explain historical change, but to advocate the study of mundane and quotidian climates through the tempos and spatialities of domestic life. In the Mediterranean, households and dwelling structures comprise most of the spatial area of the sites we investigate, even if they remain woefully unexcavated in pursuit of larger, public or state-controlled structures in dense urban environments. Household archaeologies can thus offer important evidence of norms of subsistence or logics of production, particularly of women and others often elided from history.

This paper acts as a provocation to center ancient households as the point of inquiry. I begin by highlighting issues in the current field of (pre)historical climate studies and the importance of incorporating data and interpretive frameworks of smaller and shorter spatial and temporal scales. Multiscalar analyses are key to highlighting the diversity and complexity of human perceptions and experiences of environments and changing ecologies forged through everyday practice. They also expose the generalizations of the functionalist work that treats households as data points in larger arguments about land use or urbanization. I then turn to recent scholarship in the archeology of households and highlight insights on flows of materials, energy and labor: storage, consumption, foodways and gendered production. Examples from archeological contexts reveal how everyday practices conditioned how people experienced shifting environments and built up senses and norms of climate. Despite the inherent challenges of studying microscalar or daily practices in the ancient world, as well as the difficulties extending or connecting embodied, individual choices to a specific climatic change, I end with some concluding thoughts on how household archaeologies can contribute to pressing conversations on climate and sustainability. As I have argued elsewhere [27], I take climate to refer to the mediations between people and their perceptions and experiences, through bodily and material encounters, of weather, ecological conditions and natural phenomena. Households, then, should open us up to thinking of climate alongside and in dialog with statistics of regional meteorological data.

Instead of aiming for an exhaustive coverage of one or two case studies, I sample from a range of recent scholarship to articulate broader lines of inquiry and to provoke further discussions. I focus on the ancient Mediterranean for a few reasons (Figure 1). First, there is a wealth of data from differentiated household contexts as well as, for many historical periods, textual sources that can help contextualize and compare patterns of domestic activity [28]. Household studies have increasingly exposed the heterogeneity of ancient domestic built environments, reminding us that we cannot assume the functionality or makeup of households nor the transhistorical concepts of public/private. Second, advances in paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic research have made the ancient Mediterranean a particularly robust place to explore premodern human–environment relationships. As a result, there is also a growing literature on ancient climate change in Mediterranean archeology and ancient history and available data from which to draw insights (e.g., [29,30,31]). And finally, the varied environmental and climatic conditions of Mediterranean regions, with millennia-long histories of resource use and landscape manipulation, offer compelling contexts in which to explore the relationality between households and changing ecosystems [32].

2. Going Smaller

The influx of more data and more highly resolved natural archives, like speleothems, sediment cores and tree rings, has ramped up scholarly (and public) interest in past climates and environments. Consequently, the field has turned to self-reflexively consider its methodological and interpretive frameworks ([14,33] and other articles in this issue). Among these is the issue of scale, both analytical and of past practices. The Anthropocene, once proposed as a geological epoch meant to capture humanity’s geophysical capacity to intervene in Earth systems [34] but recently voted against by the International Commission on Stratigraphy Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy [35,36], hovers over much of this discourse. If humanity, as a species, is now capable of manipulating and transforming the Earth’s atmosphere and surfaces, we need interpretive tools that think along global and planetary lines. Archeologists have rightly critiqued the conceits and presumptions of the Anthropocene [37,38,39], but the turn to considering how past societies responded to or altered Earth systems has similarly privileged large-scale analyses. Take for example “collapse” studies of imperial decline due to aridification and demographic crises through the study of agricultural economic instability and “mega-droughts” [18,40,41,42].

As noted above, the wide aperture we use to analyze societal responses or adaptations to changing climates emerges in large part from the evidence we have at hand. In the Mediterranean, regions with abundant sources of accessible paleoenvironmental data, like caves, freshwater lakes and standing forests, have provided starting points for reconstructing past environments through proxies of temperature and moisture changes, but these proxies come with diverse methodological issues for chronological precision, and many still require expensive radiocarbon dating and statistical methods to improve their resolution [43]. These records might produce trends in oscillations in local or regional temperatures at annual, decadal or centennial scales. For other regions, there exist no or very few robust paleoenvironmental studies, forcing scholars to rely on interregional data or hemispheric records, like arctic ice cores [44]. The dependency on non-local histories of ecological or climatic change thus also contributes to macroscalar spatial generalizations based on correlation and synchronization rather than direct evidence of causation. In addition, the use of survey evidence to chart changing regional settlement patterns, while capable of revealing diachronic trends in responses to broader landscape changes, typically relies on surface collections without systematic stratigraphic testing, further coarsening interpretations.

More recent applications of systems theory in archeology, in the form of resilience and sustainability studies, attempt to overcome these issues by studying societal interactions with triggering climatic and environmental events or processes through examinations of persistence and disruption, often at landscape scales ([45,46,47,48,49]; see also [9,10,11]). Indeed, in a recent bibliometric synthesis of publications using resilience and/or sustainability concepts or frameworks, Jacobson [11] found two papers out of dozens that analyzed resilient practices at the scale of the household, in distinction from regional communities, states or empires. Most studies of resilient societal adaptations to climate change are quantitative more than qualitative, using numbers of households or sites as proxy evidence for the stability and coherence of state or institutional structures, like food supply [29]. Envisioning externalized forces like climate change primarily as impacts on society, scholars can then measure whether human groups or sociopolitical structures were “more” or “less” resilient to stresses. These studies can often remain essentializing by inferring or assuming pre-existing social conditions that determine who is vulnerable and who is not along coarse models of political or economic status. Resilience discourse can also mystify the causes or material habits of vulnerability, masking over differentiated social responses or encounters with environmental change, and can downplay the structural determinants of those changes in favor of reactionary outcomes [50,51]. In addition, relying on systems frameworks or larger analytical scales can obscure how societal well-being was created primarily through the smaller-scale, everyday household practices of resource accumulation. As Bowes [52], p. 32 has argued, “We need to keep the urgency to tell big stories, but use thick, small-scale data to tell them, returning to a place we actually know quite well—the household—and exploiting both well-known and new datasets in the context of lives lived—not trends already assumed.”

Archeologists and historians have increasingly turned to advocating for smaller and shorter scales of analysis and the interpretation of integrated scalar relationships, given that looping, incremental or gradual changes are the mediations through which past people experienced and made sense of climate [53,54,55]. But as with paleoenvironmental data, the evidence available for Mediterranean households can make those moves tricky, especially in regions that lack the kinds of robust records of excavated or surveyed households and smaller social units. The majority of our evidence comes from urban residential areas, with fewer rural or non-urban domestic residences available to study [56]. While household or domestic archaeologies have been on the rise over the last few decades, providing variable and cross-cultural records, even within the Mediterranean there remain areas without commensurate data with which to compare household sizes, material histories and associated assemblages. Furthermore, the intersections between household studies and environmental and climatic histories are only beginning to gain attention. Conceptions of households and the “home” are often embedded in modern, bourgeois juxtapositions of the outside world of nature with the interior, private spaces of social life, conditioning us to keep environmental histories outside the domestic [57].

And yet as argued above, households were a key venue for the conjoining of human–environment interactions through lived experiences, “vital sites for the production and reproduction of nature…they also articulate with technologies of power while engaging in flows of matter, energy, capital, and knowledge” [58], p. 174. In past Mediterranean societies based on agricultural economies, significant amounts of production and consumption happened within households and estates of varying sizes, and people built their social worlds through dwelling and working with their families and local kinship networks, with diversely constructed ties to other scales of communities, states and regions [51]. Households were co-constituted through the micropolitics of daily life and the macrolevel structures and decision-making of larger forces, like tribes, ethnic formations or states and empires. Studying domestic realms of production, storage, consumption and social networks can therefore reveal important patterns of lived experience from bottom-up perspectives that privilege interconnections between people and their environments, not just external or exogenous triggers or shocks to the system [59,60,61]. Such frameworks can center social actors themselves, rather than abstract entities that adapt or react as parts of larger sub-systems. While archaeologies of individuals and their embodied experiences remain incredibly difficult to interpret, households offer a way to study the lives of underrepresented people, especially those who existed outside our available textual records [62]. Through household material assemblages and the remains of built environments, we can start to identify decision-making that shaped and was shaped by environments, as well as how these efforts and practices changed over time ([63]; see also [21]). In other words, we can investigate how households were not just passive and self-contained spaces but were instrumental to the making of nature [64].

But what is a household? The field of archeology has worked over the last few decades, especially since the provocation to study domestic contexts by Wilk and Rathje [65], to refine archeological and conceptual definitions borne from highly diverse, heterogeneous material records [66]. We can think of households as groupings of co-resident people, and their nonhuman networks, engaged in meaningful relationships and similar tasks, acting together socioeconomically [67,68]. Or, we might call them archeologically identifiable through physical structures that combine interior and exterior spaces for tasks and dwelling [65]. Importantly, households do not equate universally to the nuclear family, given the wide-ranging evidence for the co-residence of multiple constructed groups, and extend beyond the walls of built structures to include spaces like compounds and courtyards, refuse dumps and work areas like gardens, fields, pens and threshing floors. But equally important are self-reflexive attempts to interrogate relations of people, as a unit called a household, and the material residues of their actions in what we define as archeological contexts of households. Scholars have used household records to create comparative analyses across space and time or to follow material evidence to examine thematic issues, such as domestic scales of craft and food production, consumption and even identity [69,70,71]. Others confront households as a cultural trait, social historical practice or category of built environment in specific periods and regions ([72], see also [28]). For many, households are important indices of socioeconomic change due to a presumed conservatism in their material constraints and resistance to innovation [73]. As the field of household archeology has developed, the attention to the ecological contexts of household activities has also grown, particularly through the study of micromorphology, discard practices of botanical and faunal remains and resource management or capture, for example, in the form of water storage [74].

When considered conceptually as social groups whose activities mediated relationships between families, communities and social structures, households are additionally important for grounding studies of everyday and daily life [55,75]. Building on the ideas of practice theory as well as geographies of domesticity and micropolitics, archeologists have turned to household scales to explore the routines, habits and decisions that become interrelated with the social production of space [76,77,78]. A focus on everyday tempos can further connect to experiences of seasonality and weather, which were critical to developing norms and values associated with understandings of climates and their effects on local or regional surroundings [79]. It is important to remain attentive, however, to how the quotidian rhythms of household life were not separated from larger processes and structures, nor determined by ecological or climatic concerns. As Foxhall reminds [21], p. 417, households were dialectically intertwined with these forces at varying constructed scales, which together shaped homes and landscapes through the demands of practical needs, cultural ideals, as well as more coordinated and regulated expectations of political formations, through institutions like property and inheritance or taxation and tribute: “to what extent were household decisions shaped by constraints emanating from, on the one hand, other members of the communities in which they lived and worked, and on the other hand by political and economic forces extending beyond the local community?” (see also [80]). These interconnections between the household and society make it critical to situate studies of domestic climates against historically contingent forms of power and authority, from prehistoric villages to the empires of the Roman period and late antiquity. The diversity of household remains across the Mediterranean attests to the manifold ways that household collectives, from the so-called peasant or smallholder to landowning elites, thought about stability and persistence, the precarity and availability of preferred resources, among a myriad of other concerns.

What might an archeology of household climates look like? At one empirical level, we can draw from domestic records and household assemblages to reconstruct localized climatic and environmental conditions especially through the recovery and analysis of botanical, faunal, geomorphological, topographical and other kinds of evidence, like the residue analysis of imported materials. Additionally, such contexts can shed light on how groups responded to possible impacts or adaptations to local weather and seasonal environmental changes, such as strengthening or fortifying food reserves, mitigating climatic changes like flooding or siltation or adopting architectural choices for modulating temperature and ventilation [81]. In a recent example, Davoli [82] shows how windbreak walls in the buildings of Karanis and other arid-region settlements in Mediterranean Egypt during the Roman period worked not just to regulate flows of people, but to prevent sand accumulation. Archeologists can also consider how households modified local climates. Building on historical ecological studies, for example, to explore how humans engineer their own selective environments, archeologists can use empirical datasets to examine how households adapted microregional conditions to access preferred resources and maintained landscape practices that altered ecosystems and variables like soil conditions, water availability and vegetation cover over time [48,83].

But equally compelling are insights from political ecology that move beyond typologies of household traits to access the mediations between social actors and changing conditions, especially taking into account uneven perceptions of crisis, risk, productivity and scarcity depending on fault lines of social difference [39,84,85]. Political ecological approaches to past environments are elucidating how diverse groups within a society responded to or experienced certain changes unequally, creating multiple forms of adaptations, responses or practices of continuity. We might focus, for example, on the ways the consumption and discard of materials and nonhumans, like animals, made domestic worlds work and seem stable for different kinds of households; how property rights secured some households to particular kinds of landscapes; or how elements like fuel or crafting supplies were willingly or unwillingly brought into homes through forms of economic, social or ritual relations [86]. Some aspects of domestic human–environment relationships remain less challenging to identify and analyze than others, particularly those related to the storage, production and consumption of crafts or foodstuffs and flows of fuel and energy sources, given the durability of things like storage containers and manufacturing equipment. At the heart of these questions, however, is the recognition that within and outside households extend networks of humans and nonhuman constituents, like animals, plants and biota, entwined in complex and uneven systems of formation and exchange [58].

3. Household Climates

This section suggests three key topics, among many, where studies of households can instigate research opportunities for smaller-scale archaeologies of climate: the storage of surplus, practices of consumption and discard and engendered modalities of household management. As argued above, in the spirit of provocation rather than straightforward historical argumentation, I use a capacious rendering of the term household to refer both to the structured collective of people, generically related to social groupings through family or kinship formations, as well as to the analytical concept recovered through the material remains of domestic features of the built environment in their landscape settings. I privilege the household contexts of sedentary societies of the ancient Mediterranean, rather than attempt to synthesize all kinds of domestic or dwelling features of nomadic or semimobile configurations, although it is important to recognize that dwelling practices could be intermittent and extend beyond the single built structure into activity areas in the landscape. Although the permanent or semi-permanent structures of premodern home-making share many similarities across Mediterranean regions, they offer a starting point for challenging assumed stereotypes of human–environment relationships in historical research. Indeed, as Gillespie [87], p. 41 has noted, the recognition that households are not easily isolated or turned into proxies “means that the outcomes of their members’ actions make history, including unintended consequences.” I extend these ideas below to argue that these actions also make environmental history.

3.1. Storage

The storage of foods and harvested or extracted goods, as well as fuels, resources like water and other forms of energy capture, can show how households thought about what they needed and how they wanted to keep it as well as how they observed and managed the conditioning and preservation of their livelihoods. Archeologists can distinguish between the physical components and requirements of storage, the material apparatus through which people accumulate things, and the more abstract idea of surplus, typically defined as the accumulation beyond levels of basic subsistence needs. As Van Oyen [88] has recently put it, “‘surplus’ denotes that extra bit that allows some people to be released from the relentless need to cultivate their own foods.” For many working in archeological contexts, surplus acts as a signifier of a kind of rational activity associated with sedentism or with hierarchical societies and the ability to keep or preserve more than what a person or family requires for eating, drinking, clothing and sheltering and to control what happens to it—often for sociopolitical motivations [89]. Taking things out of circulation and storing them for future use could take numerous forms of varying archeological visibility: caches, underground pits, portable container and aboveground structures. This storage could then be converted in ways that reveal differentiated social relations, such as communal feasts, as well as diverse senses of time and need: in the realm of the storage of foodstuffs to sustain households in agricultural economies, for example, archeologists can explore how much social groups might have needed to counter risks of poor harvests, as well as how people responded to unpredictably productive harvests or bumper crops [16,90].

While concepts of “normal” surplus can often be rendered quantitatively, as numbers of calories or volumes of commodities, archeologists have increasingly recognized the social and political dimensions that turn accumulated things into a surplus with differently weighted effects: who makes decisions about what to store, how much, where and in what manner and how those production and consumption practices are dependent on surplus reproduced or generated forms of social inequality [91]. Many of these practices of accumulation operate at small scales, such as decisions to store certain foods during wet or dry seasons, adaptations of storage containers to mitigate the threat of weather events or pests, moving goods between kinds of storage at different points of the working calendar or the placing of stored things in particular areas to control accessibility [81]. Because storage and surplus have been seen as critical innovations in the development of human social complexity, the material traces of certain kinds of semi-permanent or permanent storage—which often survive in archeological records due to their durability, technologies and size—have become entryways for political ecologies of human–environment mediations [89,90,91,92]. As such, archeologists have sought to understand how storage practices, and ideas of surplus, conditioned responses and negotiations to problems like scarcity, precarity, abundance or environmental risk and unpredictability [93].

Because of the obvious material propensities of things stored and kept, like grains, wine, water or cut wood, we can turn to the diverse practices of storage that people created to account for issues of accessibility, preservation and the creation of value over time, as well as ideas and expectations of climatic norms. Recent studies in the storage of surplus grains in the ancient Mediterranean, for example, have shown how people considered the challenges of degradation and spoiling, pests and contamination and weather conditions to extend their longevity or to ensure adequate and efficient forms of food supply and trade. Cheung [94] has studied storage practices in the Roman empire, from scales of households to the state, to argue for the flexible technologies of storage and transport that brought bulk foods around and across regional territories in a world without refrigeration. Within Roman households, grain accumulations took the form of large ceramic pithoi containers, often placed into underground pits to regulate moisture and temperature, e.g., [95]. The material characteristics of different grains led to varying styles and modes of storage: threshed wheat, for example, could be more vulnerable to pests and insects if not stored in sealed containers. Controlling access to air could preserve wheats and grains like hulled barley, while sealing off other kinds of harvest, like fruits or oils, could delay ripening or spoiling. Material choices in storage, then, enacted diverse ideas of the management of weather conditions as well as expectations of value. This type of multiscalar synthesis points to ways that household decisions on prolonging the quality of foods could be entwined with state and imperial interests, particularly in the extraction of surplus from agricultural territories for wider networks of dependent populations.

Recent work on Roman economies of grain and wine storage further attests to how acts of storage and surplus accumulation mediated household–environment relationships [96,97,98]. In her study of rural practices in southern France during the Roman period, Van Oyen [94] examined evidence for continuities of viticulture and wine production at varying scales, especially in the establishment of wine fermentation using large ceramic dolia. Signs of more intensified production facilities in large agricultural estates, so-called villas like that of Les Prés-Bas (France), suggest practices of foresight, extending expectations of productive harvests into multi-year projections with associated labor and technical demands. And alongside evidence for the specialized production of wine in these large estates, archeologists have revealed many small farms in this region of southern France with wine-making infrastructure [97]. Given the typical subsistence focus presumed for rural inhabitants of the empire, especially agricultural workers or smaller-scale property owners embedded in and reliant on seasonal cycles of cultivation, economic historians have traditionally considered them conservative, risk-averse and identified through, if not innately attuned to, weather and climate (see [79]). This scholarship shows, however, that choices in how to store wine for months or years to increase its quality of taste, color and smell, among other added value traits, made rural winemakers of varying socioeconomic classes more ambitious and innovative [98]. Such evidence of taking risks for returns on the energy expended in intensive grape and wine production points to how people thought more open-endedly about expected climatic conditions, their standing and future economic stability, as well as their norms of environmental time: “in particular, storage’s rhythm of material change does not just tell us that the future was reckoned with, but what particular kind of future was envisaged” [96], p. 197.

Archeologists can also question how households navigated the spatial needs of storage and surplus in special containers, permanent structures like cisterns or granaries or more mobile kinds of vessels. Domestic built environments, while not easy to always identify as sites of dwelling or residence, often include areas where things were kept for varying periods of time, sometimes within or near living spaces and sometimes located closer to land use activities like farming, animal husbandry or the extraction of resources. Traces within domestic structures can include benches and shelves, sunken storage vessels or semi-subterranean pits or basins. In Foxhall’s [21] diachronic study of households in the Bronze and Iron Age Aegean, she argues that choices in how much food or water to store seem to have been made by individual households, even in periods with signs of the centralized authority of state interests in surplus production. Despite the regularity of the shape and sizes of excavated houses—typically rectilinear, one-room structures with attached or associated courtyards—there was diversity in where people built houses and storage facilities during the Late Bronze Age period, when states like Pylos would have governed the flow of certain commodities and materials like wool and semi-luxuries like wine. After this period, sites like Nichoria in the southwest Peloponnese transitioned to a settlement with only one seemingly “big” house: a single-room structure in which the inhabitants created extra storage space through an apsidal addition to one end of the building. While not enough of the settlement remains to understand specific power relations during the nineth and eighth centuries BCE, the evidence suggests that households were capable of regulating flows of goods and resource management alongside the strategies of powerful social actors or elites. Similarly, Seifried’s [99] recent work on later medieval and early-modern households and their water cisterns in the Mani peninsula of Greece shows how social, political and economic practices and concerns shaped water storage in this arid region, which became entwined with responses to climatic conditions. While in earlier periods, households appear to have constructed independent cisterns in a variety of techniques to keep enough water to sustain daily life during the hot dry summers, later periods saw the increasing placement of larger built cisterns in certain family compounds, suggesting the control of the access to communal or collective water. The diversity of the sizes, shapes and built features of cisterns, like compound walls, indicate that household and community senses of weather, water storage and sustaining livelihoods were constructed through social relations.

3.2. Consumption and Discard

Archeologists have long thought about consumption, using household assemblages to reconstruct socioeconomic norms, the accessibility to goods, the social and cultural logics of choice or markets or signs of wealth or social inequality as a means to examine society and its structural conditions [100,101]. Beyond viewing the house as the smallest functional economic unit of society, archeologists have sought to understand internal variations in patterns of consumption and deposition, as well as to situate households within wider networks of social groups, such as villages or urban neighborhoods, rural and productive landscapes and local or regional ecologies [102]. In this vein, attempts to analyze the household choices and control over what comes in and out of homes and what types of things are consumed are particularly salient to studies of climatic and environmental history: how and what to collect, which substitutes for fuel or resources work and which do not, how to manage food waste or spoilage or confront precarity or how to navigate unexpected windfalls.

Foodways, or the intersecting cultural, political and economic modes through which people acquired, made and consumed food, constitute an important part of household constructions of environments and nature. Equally notable to recent archaeologies of climate change in the Mediterranean are assumptions around the subsistence-based household. Closely aligned economic concepts like self-sufficiency, by which these groups were not reliant on the trade or exchange of supplies, further construct scholarly ideas of the convergence of environmental conditions, economic action and household stability [79,103]. Recent interrogations of constructs of subsistence and self-sufficiency have increasingly contested their universalisms and thrown doubt on their historical realities, particularly in the more marginal or unstable of Mediterranean ecologies [104]. Paying attention to flows of food within and beyond households can therefore be an important step to nuancing long-held assumptions about Mediterranean agricultural populations, the “peasant” and the premodern working classes of food producers, as well as to expanding our study of the cultural and social practices behind household food consumption. In addition, archaeologies of food consumption have shown how meals, from the everyday to the feast, reproduced social and political structures through the choices, display and rituals of eating and drinking [105]. They also mediated household relationships to the environment and climate. To take one example of these ideas, Halstead [106] has argued that during the transition between the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods in the Aegean, special meals were created from more highly valued harvested foods and scarce ingredients, as opposed to the more available options for everyday eating, to mark social differentiation amongst households. At Bronze Age centers like Pylos, those with greater status were able to overproduce staple grains, turn them into more elaborate meals or feed them to livestock and thereby mobilize labor while also conspicuously consuming goods, despite risks of shortages due to poor harvests. Through the work of formal “feasts” and the cleaving of high-value foods and fodder, people used food to reinforce links between their control over agricultural production and labor and commensal politics.

Consuming landscapes also structured fuel use. Wood was a critical energy source in the Mediterranean world, and recent estimates suggest that wood fuel supported half the functioning of ancient economies. Yet fuel, as an increasingly important topic of long-term environmental and energy history, is often studied at the scale of urban needs, such as supplying a Roman city with enough charcoal to heat its baths, or abstracted as quantities of wood charcoal required for industrial uses, such as metallurgy [107]. Households were also important consumers of fuel, particularly for the maintenance and firing of hearths for dwelling and food production as well as for domestic craft production, in the form of kilns or furnaces. Steps in acquiring, managing, storing and using wood brought people into wider networks of trees, forests and states, with attendant choices on what fuel types and which heating sources to combine. Societies around the Mediterranean engaged with multiple kinds of wood sources, such as lowland maquis or montane forests, and often chose certain kinds of wood for selected purposes. For many people, collecting wood was likely an important part of everyday life and was necessarily mediated by these local or regional conditions, whether foraging or gathering branches and twigs or maintaining groves or orchards of trees to prune for a systematic supply. For others, options to use wood or charcoal, a denser energy source, were likely shaped not just by household desires or the capability to produce charcoal, but through their access to markets or interregional exchange, particularly for charcoal commodified for domestic use [108]. Additionally, scholars have shown how woods differed in their propensities to ignite quickly, let off less smoke and yield more heat and for longer amounts of time, creating a complex field of practical and cultural knowledge for choosing certain fuel sources [109]. These practices of the acquisition, use and even re-use of wood would have put pressure on local resources as well as been impacted by shifting climatic conditions that shaped vegetation and forestry areas.

Mediterranean households also incorporated other “secondary” matter derived from their practices and environments to use as fuel, such as animal dung, peat and olive oil pressings, or pomace, the latter of which is archeologically recoverable as fragments after carbonization. As a byproduct of olive oil production, olive cakes or pomace would have been efficient sources to burn in domestic ovens and hearths in lieu of, or in preference over, wood charcoal despite its lower calorific value [110]. In a recent study of archeological traces of carbonized olive stones throughout the Roman empire, for example, Rowan [110] has shown that households at Herculaneum and Pompeii, in southern Italy, used pomace as a fuel. In one excavated sewer tunnel at Herculaneum, the paleobotanical findings show an overwhelming signature of pomace, deposited as waste after its service for domestic fuel needs. Differentiating the evidence at these sites between the olive seeds discarded after cooking from olive stones, crushed and carbonized after pressing, reveals important trends in household consumption practices mediated through temporal and economic engagements with olives: as an oil, fruit and fuel. This evidence also points to the contingent decisions households made in consuming energy; despite available wood charcoal sources, some inhabitants at Pompeii and Herculaneum chose pomace for its easier and efficient handling, especially for cooking.

Archaeologies of discard, waste and re-use, like turning pomace into fuel, have opened up important avenues for understanding household practices as they constructed and responded to climatic and environmental conditions. As others have noted, the question of what to do with “waste” is social and political, even cultural, and not just economic [111]. Archeologists have turned to thinking about circular economies beyond single-use and disposal or discard practices, including the re-use and recycling of materials in systems of craft production or the continued value of things over time, despite their loss of their original function (e.g., [112]). Household studies have also thought about the varying tempos and perceptions of discard, from the everyday cleaning of accumulated things to the more abrupt, singular events of removal “that disrupt the equilibrium of everyday life” [74], p. 9 and [113]. As argued above, the flows of things and “waste” through and around households can reveal insights into the relationships people forged between their home-making practices and wider environments, senses of place and expectations of future change. Studies of landscape and environmental change surrounding the industrial scales of mining in the Iberian peninsula, across the second century BCE and second century CE, provide traces of working households living amongst mining waste. Gosner [114] has argued that as the Roman extractivist economy of mining took over the region, it required new kinds of settlements that supported thousands of working people, especially smaller and more easily controllable villages that the state equipped with public services, like schools and baths, to maintain high levels of labor productivity. At Corta Lago at Rio Tinto, one of the largest scale mining enterprises in southwestern Spain, archeologists uncovered the remains of one of these small towns buried under tons of slag deposits, a byproduct of smelting, with several buildings still visible [115]. Homes here of the first century BCE were physically constructed from industrial waste, re-using large slag fragments for architectural support. While it remains challenging to interpret these choices in built construction due to the fragmentary recovery of the site, as Gosner argues, it is clear that the expansion and intensification of mining in Iberia deeply impacted the everyday nature-making of local people in uneven ways.

3.3. Gender, Women’s Work and Generational Time

Household studies are additionally important for their ability to recover engendered experiences in past communities, a key structuring force of social difference that can often escape notice at larger scales of analysis. Decades of attention to gender and sexuality in archeological scholarship have emphasized the mutability of gender expressions and identities in the ancient Mediterranean, the false transhistorical idea of rigid gender and sex binaries as well as the historically constructed logics structuring divisions of labor across categories of age, gender, ethnicity or disability [116,117,118]. For the sake of space, I focus here on environmental archaeologies of women, although we should advocate the intersectional study of the plurality of gendered experiences and embodied practices in ancient households and landscapes. Despite the lopsided nature of available textual sources, such as the Oikonomikos of Xenophon or Hesiod’s poem Works and Days for the Greek world, which privilege the concerns of men, we understand that women were often the ones making household decisions around the management of flows of resources, labor and production, making them consequential for the production of household space and human–nature relationships. As Beaudry notes, “the shift of emphasis on household as productive unit to that of an often highly differentiated and complex system of both fixed and shifting relationships has led to a strong focus on the gendered nature of household activities—for instance, on women’s work both in terms of tasks and chores and often as arbiters of taste, morality, and behavior” ([74], pp. 3–4). The themes of domestic production and traditional knowledge are therefore pertinent to studying how household practices, norms and decision-making reproduced larger-scale economic and political processes as well as relationships with climates and environments. They can also further reveal how climatic or environmental changes could have uneven impacts for different gendered groups as well as amplify gendered inequalities.

Building on feminist archaeologies and geographies of domesticity, scholars have increasingly sought to analyze the spaces and gendered dynamics of domestic labor, production and consumption as flexible and constructed at different scales. Women likely engaged in many tasks, like agricultural and horticultural work, resource gathering, food processing, animal husbandry and childrearing, not to mention what we learn from sources about their roles in home-making, labor mobilization and household ritual activity [117]. In certain societies and periods women also owned property. These activities of provisioning and tending the home enmeshed actors in wider environments and produced gendered experiences of the weather, environment and climate (e.g., [119]). In the Greek world, for example, iconographic and textual evidence suggests that women handled the provisioning of water for households through trips to springs, fountains or other sources [120]. Encountering changes moreover, especially in the times of scarcity or intensifying vulnerability, would have put pressure on women to find additional resources and manage increased workloads, particularly through processes of provisioning [for data on recent global climate change and gender, see [121]. These encounters also produced ideas of the landscape and climate through embodied forms of traditional knowledge that could be passed on to others. More broadly, these domestic practices shaped local forms of knowledge about the seasons, weather and environmental changes, which led to the creation of place-based imaginations within and beyond the household [122]. While it is important not to essentialize gendered categories via particular material traits or practices, household assemblages can reveal how these forms of environmental knowledge shaped everyday decisions around productivity and flows of materials.

Another example of the intersections between domestic craft production and gendered knowledge in the ancient Mediterranean relates to textile and cloth production, one of the more archeologically visible ways to ascertain “women’s work” in premodern households. Archeologists have regularly analyzed textile production through the ubiquitous presence of tools and equipment such as loom weights and spindle whorls as well as iconographic evidence in excavated contexts [123]. While studies have often focused on the craftsmanship of textile work itself, or on the equipment or finished products, the chaîne opératoire of production required a knowledge of plants and animals and the seasonal availability of local resources. Through work, women and other actors made decisions on sources of materials and their qualities, the equipment needed to achieve diverse scales of production and the design of finished products in relation to domestic, community and often state interests. In recent research on the production of sail cloths for Greek warships during the Classical period, for example, Dimova et al. [124] follow the technological steps of making large wind sails to argue that in times of war, the state pressed existing domestic labor into service, scaling up household work to produce military goods. Navigating these abruptly shifting scales, women and free or enslaved laborers were forced to confront new flows of supplies of materials, like flax, through their households.

Attending to gendered and embodied experiences of home-making can shed light on the formation of knowledge around ecologies, nature and landscapes as well as to senses of household temporality. In the absence of data on land tenure and property rights, more attention to the duration of households at particular locations can reveal how their inhabitants built permanence and longevity through ties to the land and the creation of worked and meaningful places [27]. In many ancient Mediterranean state-based societies, claims to land with “good” soils or valued resources became operationalized as forms of property and ownership, which could generate new concerns over inheritance and succession, materialized through wealth in marriage and dowry rituals. Thus women’s role in the reproduction of families and kinship groups often led to investments in cross-generational connections and to ancestors, rooted in household and landscape practices and rituals of commemoration as well as to claims of belonging to families, kin groups, ethnic identities or otherwise. Granular studies of household assemblages and features are also a helpful direction for assessing tempos of occupation and abandonment, for example, in the reconfiguration of spaces to accommodate changing needs and working conditions at seasonal or generational scales. In a recent example, Mann [125] has analyzed microhistories of abandonment among the excavated households of the Early Iron Age settlement of Zagora, on the Greek island of Andros. Recording the practices of the cleaning and discard of this site reveals patterns of what households valued and how senses of time structured what could be left behind for ongoing but less visibly permanent use. At Zagora, large food storage vessels and loom weights appear to have been taken while leaving the site, perhaps as markers of inherited traditions or economic value, while some basic cooking equipment was left behind in some houses. It appears that deliberate planning and anticipatory conditions structured the more intermittent, and potentially less rooted, forms of household living after the eighth century BCE.

4. Conclusions: Toward an Archeology of Everyday Climate Change

The work drawn from the Mediterranean studies summarized above illustrates the importance of archeological research on the intersections of household life and environments in the making of history. Attending to practices of storage and surplus production, consumption and discard and domestic work highlights the interpretive potential of household contexts in archaeologies of climate and environmental change. Other topics could equally bring the domestic to bear on current interests in past environments: taking care, living with and exploiting animals, mobility and seasonal dwelling practices, processes of household abandonment, landscape engineering or ideational and affective relationships to materials. In choosing to sample from diverse periods and places, I have withdrawn from an attempt to make a singular methodological or historical argument and rather aimed to build up comparative and multiscalar questions of household–environment histories for future research. Choosing to examine smaller spatial scales and shorter temporal scales of past practice can complement existing work in archaeologies of climate that operate at the level of landscapes, societies and regional systems. It is important then for future analyses to turn to creating robust quantitative and qualitative studies of household assemblages that can produce effective arguments and modes of explanation about how people in the past experienced climates through everyday, domestic activities [126]. Studies that produce highly resolved spatial and temporal distributions of materials within and alongside household features, as well as the systematic recovery of information on production and consumption practices, are a clear next direction.

We should not reduce the domestic only to the small scale but refocus our inquiry to the dialectics between scales and their co-constitution, between the particular and general, the short term and long term, the small scale of weather and the big scale of climate. But equally, I have argued that households were sites of practices, often mundane or quotidian, which mediated past people’s understandings and experiences of environments and climates, and they should also be studied on their own terms. A “domestic” lens to environmental history is therefore valuable inasmuch as it reminds us that the small scale is typically where we begin, as humans, to become embedded in material environments and webs of life. Household archaeologies, moreover, remain some of our prime vantage points for the environmental history-making of people beyond the ruling class.

These are important analytical and interpretive moves to consider in light of recent, twenty-first century attempts to refocus conversations on environmental policy and regulation around the home and household [58,85,127]. Our contemporary moment is also one of a crisis in housing and climate migration, concerns that have led some to argue for deregulations on policies of home-building and civic and technological infrastructure through metaphors of abundance, particularly in places in the Global North [128,129]. These shifts are part of broader neoliberal concerns to promote markets and to push concepts of responsibility for environmental sustainability onto individuals through operational logics like recycling, green living and ecofriendly consumer goods, as well as to constrain mounting anxieties about scarcity and environmental degradation within structures of growing inequality. We should therefore be aware of the current politics of a focus on homes and housing, but equally use archeology, and the broader strengths of the humanities and social sciences, to contribute to these conversations by exposing deeper histories of small-scale engagement with and management of changing environments, as well as the political and social dimensions that shaped those lived realities. We can articulate how the household was a critical site of environmental construction, experience and history-making by investigating how the more readily conceivable, and comprehensible, modes of everyday practice relate to the big scales of climate.

5. Captions

Sites mentioned in text. Map created by author.