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

70|ANASTASIA CHRISTOPHILOPOULOU
Additional factors relate to the economic sphere of the
household. These require an account of the storage facilities and
storage capacity of the household as well as the investigation of the
consumption levels and patterns within each architectural unit.
Turning to parameters that can inform us about the symbolic
sphere of the household, the situation becomes more complicated.
While it is relatively easy to accept that objects examined within a
household context are likely to have both functional and symbolic
qualities, one must be absolutely sure of how these functional qualities
operate in the domestic unit in order to be able to distinguish
the symbolic/ritual ones. 2 Such a task proves to be difficult, especially
if the material in question comes from societies in transition,
or small scale communities, or communities not always sharing a
given cultural koinē all of which are likely to be characteristic of
Early Iron Age island societies. However, in some cases, activities
related to ritual abandonment could be traced in the archaeological
record of Iron Age households by closely observing patterns of use
and discard of particular classes of objects within the domestic assemblage.
3
HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY
One can go on to a great extent about the importance of household
studies in Classical and Greek Archaeology in particular, but it
is mostly in the sense of interdisciplinarity that this research direction
has more to offer. Indeed, if there is one field of Classical Archaeology
that has truly incorporated research questions, theories
and (to some extent) methodologies from other social sciences,
during the course of the past two decades, that is, household archaeology.
This innovation however, did not sprung out of the
field of Classical Archaeology, but has arrived there following the
example of world archaeology.
Two of the disciplines that have most positively crossfertilised
households studies (whether Classical or not) are Ethnography
and ethnoarchaeological studies. Today as a result of that, a
number of researchers have gone that far as to identify a household
2 ALLISON (1999) 2–3.
3 SCHIFFER (1985) 18–21.