“semitisches pantheon”. eine “männliche tyche” - MOSAIKjournal.com

DOMESTIC SPACE AND COMMUNITY IDENTITY |109
THE SYMBOLIC AND BEHAVIOURAL SPHERE OF EARLY
IRON AGE HOUSEHOLDS
As widely accepted among researchers of the domestic environment,
the household as a social entity is an agglomeration of individual
intentions, desires and behaviours, which contend and compromise
with those of other individuals to produce household decisions
and actions. The examination of household examples in the
Early Iron Age has also made apparent that a “household” in the
particular geographical and temporal frame is not a tidy, fixed or
close category. Moreover, the specification of who or what is contained
in a household, and the boundaries between households, are
often hard to pin down. 103 This is partly because household structure
is not something static. In the course of even one lifetime,
roles, status, economic resources and personnel change. 104 Equally
gender roles may change as well.
In relation to these two observations, I will discuss a number
of criteria affecting spatial behaviour in Early Iron Age architecture,
such as the dimensions of the living space, the topographical
placement of household units within the community, the symbolic
implications of space occupied by previous generations within a
settlement, and finally their patterns of communication (including
nonverbal communication).
Obviously dimension and form of living space influenced spatial
behaviour and, as expected, the least complex spatial behaviour
is usually found within smaller dwellings with only little space available
per inhabitant. In dwellings with little space per inhabitant, the
same personal area is normally used for eating, working and sleeping,
while dwellings with more space show more complex activity
patterns. We should equally assume that within larger dwellings,
with more space per inhabitant, each person is often involved in
activities carried out in different activities areas. We can assume a
similar pattern in the small, one-room household in the Early Iron
Age with probably small-scale organisation of space representing
the fairly simple structure of the small society in which the household
belongs. 105 Of the case-studies examined here, the one-room
103 FOXHALL (1989) 24–26.
104 FOXHALL (1989) 20–24.
105 RÄNK (1949) 51.