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

112|ANASTASIA CHRISTOPHILOPOULOU
could be used for any sort of outdoor work, as a result of which
the residents were more isolated from their neighbours and the
outside world and the possibilities of contact with that world were
more controlled. Finally, one aspect of nonverbal communication
is inter-visibility between rooms. 110 This can be understood from
the way in which “pathways” through the house are organised. For
example, the sequential arrangement of rooms in houses of the
Early Iron Age is determined by a design with a clear visual connection
between the rooms and axially aligned entrances. In contrast,
“radial” Archaic houses have a non-axial alignment of doorways
and lack intervening spaces from which rooms branch off. 111
TEMPORALITY AND INSULARITY
It remains to discuss the temporal dimension of activities within a
household and the way these activities are “reflected” in the archaeological
record of excavated houses. To explain this dimension
we need to return to a fundamental statement of the sociological
analysis of the household, the one that admits that the dynamic
flow of social life is speedy and that its time-scales are short-term.
As the study of the past has increasingly shifted away from the
spectacular, the great and the good, towards unravelling the ordinary
patterns of everyday living, “life paths” and “lifecycles”, we
are increasingly forced to confront these short-term time scales of
lived reality and question our methods of understanding these
short-term realities through the “timeless” or often “silent” archaeological
record. 112
Consideration of these short-term time-scales is therefore particularly
meaningful for the examination of daily patterns and life
stages. The archaeological impact of daily and life-stage time-scales
has rarely been explored, despite the fact that the archaeological
investigation of domestic space has become an area of interest. It
is, however, here that the aggregate of “quotidian behaviours” and
activities can be most dramatically misinterpreted if their remains
are read “amorphously” as a long-term trend. Indeed, in very few
excavated examples continuous occupation can be demonstrated
110 CIOLEK (1978) 52–59.
111 LANG (2005) 29, fig. 2, 1 e–k. 2, 4.
112 FOXHALL (2000) 484–486.