Household Archaeology and House Societies
Kahn, J.G. 2021. Houses of Power: Community Houses and Specialized Houses as Markers of Social Complexity in the Pre-contact Society Island Chiefdoms. In Archaeology of Households, Kinship, and Social Change, edited by L.B. Carpenter and A. Prentiss, pp. 82–110. Routledge, London and New York.
World-wide, communal houses and specialized houses represent hallmarks of social complexity. In pre-contact Society Island chiefdoms, social complexity was materially marked by architectural differences between elite and commoner residences. Yet perhaps more pronounced are architectural differences and varied spatial patterning between residential houses, communal houses, and specialized houses. This paper provides a spatio-temporal analysis of communal and specialized houses on the Maʻohi landscape. Tacking back and forth from the micro-scale to a landscape approach highlights how communal and specialized houses not only materially marked socio-economic rank, but created landscapes of power, or landscapes of inclusion and exclusion based on one’s rank and bounded status. In this way, communal houses and specialized houses serve as important hallmarks of increasing social complexity in the late prehistoric Society Island chiefdoms.
Kahn, J.G. 2014. Household Archaeology and ‘House Societies’ in the Hawaiian Archipelago. Journal of Pacific Archaeology 5(2): 18–29.
This paper discusses the House Society theoretical perspective and its advantages for Hawaiian household archaeology studies. I argue that House Society models have much to offer in moving household archaeology away from strict materialist approaches to those that explore ideational factors, including how inter- and intra- household variability are linked to social and ideological factors such as rank and status. The paper synthesizes previous household archaeology research in the archipelago, in addition to exploring new case studies (erived from my own research in Hawai‘i highlighting the efficacy of the House Society approach.
Kahn, J.G. 2015. Identifying Residences of Ritual Practitioners in the Archaeological Record as a Proxy for Social Complexity. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 40: 59–81.
In this article I argue that while dedicated ritual specialists often had indispensable roles in ancient religions and significant impacts on political histories, few archaeological studies have developed methodologies for recovering direct evidence for ritual practitioners. The article provides a synthetic discussion of ethnohistoric and ethnographic data to model what priests did in ancient societies, and what the material correlates of their dwellings and activities might look like. I then present archaeological data from two late prehistoric house sites identified as priest dwellings from East Polynesia. That priests’ houses are often situated within corporate ritual centers speaks to the import of such sites and their associated ceremonial activities in the strategic use of ideology to institutionalize social hierarchies and political status, a pattern seen in many other ranked societies in Polynesia and other case studies world-wide.
Kahn, J.G. 2016. Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions. Journal of Anthropological Research 24(4): 325–372.
This article provides the first synthetic review of household archaeology in Polynesia. I. I begin with a discussion of houses and households as objects of archaeological study in Polynesia, discussing their historical analysis through time. I relate the initial advent of household archaeology in the region to regionally based settlement pattern studies. I then discuss current holistic analyses which engage with both the material and the non-material aspects of the house, and in particular, how social relations structure the household. The second half of the article concerns major thematic debates in East Polynesian household archaeology, including functional identification of households, understanding social variability, articulation of the household with the community, and comparative analyses of social complexity. Throughout, I relate the practice of Polynesian household archaeology to larger debates within the field world-wide.
Kahn, J.G. 2016. Holistic Houses and a Sense of Place: Contextualizing the Bishop Museum Hale Pili Exhibit through Archaeological Analyses. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research (4): 181–195.
This article discusses the process of refinding the initial location of the Bishop Museum’s hale pili (Hawaiian pole and thatch house) and an archaeological investigation of the site’s surface architecture, use of space, and subsurface activities. The study touches upon themes relevant to representations of culture and place in museum exhibits, analysis of existing museum collections to holistically interpret material culture, and the history of anthropological collecting. The hale pili represents a “hybrid” form, with elements of precontact Hawaiian folk housing and European concepts introduced in the postcontact period. This problematizes the notion of “traditional” when used in relation to indigenous cultures in settler societies and the practice of exhibiting unique examples of “authentic” housing in isolation. Such analyses increase our interpretive abilities for museum collections and exhibits in the long term, particularly in reunifying folk housing and other material culture with location, a sense of place, and locale.