Penelope Allison’s 2001 article on using material and written sources to study Roman domestic space has framed the debate on the topic more broadly for ancient world housing. In this chapter, she revisits that contribution and responses to it, and surveys the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the chapters in the volume. By examining the nature of the data, analytical and interpretative approaches to them, and the research questions, Allison assesses the extent to which the two decades since her critique have produced more critically engaged scholarship, particularly in approaches to relationships between textual and material evidence.

Perhaps the most commonly invoked aspects of the home found on Athenian vases are doors, which suggest transitions. In the case of marriage scenes, these transitions are the beginnings and ends of the gamelia, the procession from the bride’s home to the groom’s. The doors represent transition and help us to envision the gamelia, as noted in textual sources, but some, perhaps more importantly, provide a glimpse into the home itself, particularly the thalamos or wedding chamber in which the marriage is culminated. A synthesis of sources here aids a more thorough understanding of the importance of the marriage bed and its room, the thalamos, in the home as well as through the wedding ritual. This in turn brings our attention most appropriately to the essential role of the home in the marriage, on the occasion of the wedding and thereafter.

When 19th-century excavators uncovered domestic buildings at classical Greek urban sites, they also uncovered a problem: words and walls did not match. The clash between sources led to a clash between scholars. This chapter explores the origin of this perceived gap between words and walls and shows that it is the result of clashing philosophies, rather than faulty sources. Discussions of ancient Greek houses began in 16th-century Italy, at a time when no Greek houses were available to study. Scholars created their own plans, drawing on ancient texts and surviving Roman remains. Their designs were intended to facilitate philosophical discussions, not to rebuild the past. In contrast, archaeologists wanted to rebuild. They needed labels to describe the buildings they had found. They mined ancient texts to create a terminology for domestic spaces and features. Inevitably, text and archaeology did not match. It is time to step away from the gap and re-evaluate our approach to investigating ancient houses. Through a re-examination of evidence for 4th-century BCE Athenian houses in texts and material remains, this chapter demonstrates how different ancient sources can work in parallel to advance knowledge of domestic life in the ancient Greek city.

Philosophical studies of the interpretation of sensory information have emphasized the central role of senses in the body’s experience of the world as well as highlighting the plurality and overlap in one’s sensory responses to it. This chapter investigates how far such concepts of experiencing space through a multisensory lens are valid for the ancient Roman villa residences of mainland Italy. Sensory responses to the Roman house have previously been restricted to examining sightlines within and outside the house, as well as movement and access within it. When we consider Pliny’s descriptions of his villas, Vitruvius’ guidance on developing a villa, or Seneca’s description of Scipio’s villa, however, it becomes clear that these residences could affect numerous sensorial responses. As such, foregrounding vision and movement above other senses experienced in the Roman domestic realm risks providing only a partial understanding of life in these residences. This chapter proposes the application of further theoretical frameworks, such as soundscapes and smellscapes, for studying the villa.

The Classical house can be understood also as a set of interactions between people, objects and valuable commodities that existed within and extended beyond the physical and temporal confines of the house. This chapter concerns ceramic oil jars, lekythoi, that date to the early 5th century BCE. It is argued that the small black-figured lekythoi, which were prolifically produced and widely traded during this time, may have held olive oil, not just perfume. The materiality of these pots and archaeological evidence from settlements, graves and other find-spots suggest that lekythoi could have functioned as oil pitchers to serve small portions of olive oil, perhaps of family production. Vase iconography indicates that such lekythoi were objects within easy reach, to be used on diverse occasions, such as dining, ritual and commercial activities. The offering of lekythoi in burials, irrespective of the presence of contents, could have alluded to the storage of olive oil in the household of the deceased and communicated a powerful message about a family’s claims to status, real or fictitious.

Scholarship on Early Greek housing has moved from creating fictional reconstructions based on Homeric poetry, through typological sorting of archaeological houses by shape and rooms, to analysing access patterns and functionalization. These more recent approaches have largely estranged epic poetry from archaeology. However, since they seek to understand domestic structures as experienced by living people, there is a way to build poetry back in by using it to explore the ways their inhabitants thought about domestic spaces. The phrase ‘in the halls’ is used abundantly in the Homeric and Hesiodic corpus as a metonymy for familial life and prosperity. The phrase should be read not as a reality to be sought in the archaeological record but abstractly as an indicator of the importance of physical space in a household’s formation and success. The link between prosperity, family and house can also be seen in the renovations and increasing complexities in some early Greek domestic architecture. Success and wealth modify and are expressed in the house. ‘In the halls’ thus refers to an important cultural idea, also seen in archaeology, linking house, home and family with prosperity.

This chapter uses the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre to examine the way in which the Roman house operated as a ‘space of desire’ and to illuminate the processes of house and household formation and social reproduction. It draws on a variety of Roman examples, including Pliny’s villas, the luxury villas of the Roman imperial period and late antiquity, and the small houses of Roman Egypt. Spatial theory focuses attention on the processes of social reproduction in Roman societies. The chapter argues for the inclusion of agency (the desiring subject) in our understanding of houses, shifting analytical focus from taxonomies and formal architectural features. It traces the analytical shift between spaces on the ground to forms in society and argues that the slippage between the two reflects a fundamental perception that social forms have a spatial existence and that spatial forms have a social meaning.

Farmsteads are ubiquitous across the Greek world. Within the canon of farmsteads, there are a variety of site types, which have a direct correlation to the socio-economic objectives of the household that used them. As a result, they are often the focus of scholarship for both archaeologists and historians who utilize the intersection between texts and archaeology to reconstruct a farmstead’s role within ancient agriculture. Frequently, a point of discussion is the relationship between the depiction of farming in textual sources, and the identification and interpretation of such sites, especially from the evidence of pedestrian landscape survey. This chapter describes a methodology for farmstead identification and a role-based classification. A holistic method is utilized that employs textual and archaeological data,with the aim of creating a well-rounded picture of how farmsteads functioned within an agricultural landscape. Following on from this, computational modelling is used to model the connectivity between sites and illustrate how different farmstead types could be used to complete farming tasks. The results from this chapter will demonstrate the value of employing a variety of evidence types to create models of the agricultural landscape that, in turn, further illuminate the experience of the ancient farmer.

One of the places where the disjuncture between the different qualities of written and material sources is perhaps most clear is in their temporal aspects. For example, ancient documents such as papyri were produced in a particular moment, within formal constraints of documentary practices. By contrast, the life cycles of houses tend to pivot around human – and less formal – scales of generational time: the biological life cycles of individual people and the life cycles of families. Archaeological houses hold the material memory of such cycles. This chapter examines the way the material form of the house can hold these different forms of time, and explores the way archaeological time can disrupt other ways of conceptualizing the past, for instance, in historical periodization. With specific reference to the houses of Dura-Europos in Arsacid and Roman Syria, the chapter questions the differing temporalities of the different forms of evidence and asks how these might be used together, avoiding the urge to force them to align, in order to paint a richer picture of ancient houses.

Historians and archaeologists habitually describe ancient households as domestic contexts without explaining what the neologism means or how it relates to Greek and Roman household organization. This chapter interrogates the disciplinary usage of the term by exploring how the category of the ‘domestic’ has evolved at the intersection between representations of private life in modern museum galleries and Athenian vase-painting, on the one hand, and normative evaluations of significant and insignificant human action, on the other. A survey of three museum displays (in the Museo Ercolanese, the British Museum and the Getty Villa) reveals a shift in how the domestic sphere was defined, substituting for the models provided by the architecture of European noble estates the home of the Victorian citizen, with its gendered distinctions between private and public. To understand this shift the discussion extends from the factors of industrialization and middle-class consumption foregrounded in social histories of the 19th century to the contemporaneous discovery of non-mythological scenes in Athenian vase-painting as depictions of ‘everyday life’.

The archetypical elite Roman house (domus) was entered through the vestibulum. In what is the locus classicus, Aulus Gellius defines the vestibulum as a ‘vacant place before the entrance, midway between the door of the house and the street’ (Gellius 16.5). More than a hundred classical texts inform us about the characteristics of vestibula, but for all this textual evidence, ‘real’ vestibula have been remarkably hard to find in the archaeological record. This chapter offers a study of Roman domestic vestibula on the basis of both literary and archaeological sources. In the first part, it is argued that most architectural rooms or spaces that have been labelled as vestibula do not correspond to vestibula as described in the textual evidence. In the second part, a number of reasons for this mismatch are reviewed, after which new ways of dealing with both kinds of evidence are offered, to overcome the discrepancies between the sources.