The Origins of the Village Revisited: From Nuclear to Extended Households

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Kent V. Flannery

AmericanAntiquity, Vol. 67, No. 3. (Jul., 2002), pp. 417-433.

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 ARTICLES

THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED:

FROM NUCLEAR TO EXTENDED HOUSEHOLDS

Kent V. Flannery

In Mesoamerica and the Near East, the emergence of the village seems to have involved two stages. In the first stage, individ-
uals were distributed through a series of small circular-to-oval structures, accompanied by communal or "shared" storage fea-
tures. In the second stage, nuclear families occupied substantial rectangular houses with prívate storage rooms. Over the last
30 years a wealth of datafrom the Near East, Egypt, the Trans-Caucasus, India, Africa, and the Southwest U. S. have enriched
our understanding ofthis phenomenon. And in Mesoamerica and the Near East, evidence suggests that nuclear family house-
holds eventually gave way to a third stage, one featuring eXtended family households whose greater labor force made possible
extensive multifaceted economies.

En Mesoamérica y el Cercano Oriente, la evoluci6n de las primeras aldeas parece haber pasado por dos etapas. En la primera
etapa, los miembros del grupo ocupaban una serie de pequeños abrigos circulares u ovalados, y mantenfan dep6sitos comunales
para el uso de todos. En la segunda etapa, familias nucleares vivfan en casas rectangulares con cuartos de dep6sito privados.
Durante los últimos 30 años, datos del Cercano Oriente, Egipto, India, Africa, el Suroeste de los E.E.U.U. y la regi6n Trans-
Caucásica han amplificado el conocimiento de tales cambios residenciales. Además, en Mesoamérica y el Cercano Oriente, se ha
notado una tercera etapa: casas para familias nucleares fueron reemplazadas po~ residencias más grandes, en las cuales una
familia extendida de 15-20 personas proporcion6 mano de obra para una economfa compleja.

I n 19.72, Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby (1972) extended family, often patrilocal and polygamous.
published a seminar volume heavy with settle- In cases where aman has only one wife, the marital
ment pattern and urbanization studies. Having pair may live together in a relatively large hut; when
worked on early villages in Mesoamerica and the aman has multiple wives, each has her own relatively
Near East, 1contributed a paper comparing and con- small hut. Widows, widowers, and unmarried young
trasting tliem (Flannery 1972). 1have now been asked men may also havé their own huts, and there can be
by American Antiquity to revisit, in the light of new a large hut for entertaining visitors. The group's infor-
data, sorne of the issues raised by that paper. In the mal headman may have larger-than-average storage
course of so doing 1 will discuss a later stage of vil- facilities, so that he can feed needy members of the
lage organization, one which followed the period 1 settlement. Examples of this settlement type can be
covered in 1972. found in Archaic Mesoamerica and in the Natufian
At the time of the original seminar, 1believed that and Prepottery Neolithic A (PPNA) cultures of the
in the early villages of Mesoamerica and the Near Near East (Flannery 1972:30-38).
East 1 could recognize two types of societies, each The second type of society lived in true villages
documented in the ethnographic literature: The first of rectangular houses, each large enough for a nuclear
type lived in encampments or compounds of circu- family. In Mesoamerica the houses were of wattle-
lar huts. Many of those huts seemed too small to and-daub and had storage pits adjacent to them; in
house an entire family, and virtually all of the soci- the Near East the houses had walls of mud, mud
ety's storage units were out in the open, as if their brick, ordrylaid stonemasonry and weredividedinto
contents were to be shared. Such societies seemed rooms, sorne of which served for storage. Archaeo-
analogous to peoples in the ethnographic present logical · examples include Early Formative
whosé encamped group is essentially a large Mesoamerican sites and Prepottery Neolithic B vil-

Kent V. Flannery • Museum of Anthropo1ogy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1079

American Antiquity, 67(3), 2002, pp. 417-433

Copyright© 2002 by the Society for American Archaeo1ogy

417
418 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
lages of the Near East. Such villages might have spe-
cial structures that could be shrines, temples, or men's
houses, but their food was not stored in such waya
as to suggest communal sharing (Flannery
1972:38-46).
In both Mesoamerica and the Near East, villages
of rectangular, nuclear family houses tended to
replace settlements of small, circular huts over time.
I suggested in 1972 that the village of nuclear fam-
ilies had certain advantages that might have led to
this transition. Among other things, there is more
incentive for intensification of production when each
family can "privatize" its storage (including any sur-
plus), rather than having to share with neighbors.
At the time, I fully expected that someone work-
ing on Natufian or Prepottery Neolithic sites would
eventually test my model for the first settlement type
by doing the following: (1) excavating each circular
hut in such a way as to keep its inventory separate;
(2) using measures of association to search for men's
and women's toolkits; (3) searching forrelationships
between tool kits and hut size, presence/absence of
hearths, presence/absence of mortars, etc.; and (4)
using multidimensional scaling to determine which
hut inventories were most alike and which most dif-
ferent, tying the results not only to hut size but also
to the location ofhuts relative to each other. M y sus-
picion was that larger huts would have both men's
and women's tool kits; sorne small huts with hearths
would have only women's tool kits; sorne small huts
without hearths would have only men 's tool kits; and
sorne adjacent huts might share artifact style prefer-
ences. Stratum 11 of Nabal Oren seemed to cry out
for such an analysis, since the preliminary report on
Huts 9 and 10 showed suggestive differences (Fig-
ure 1).
To be sure, I did not expect that every item in such
a hut would be lying exactly where it was last used;
we are all familiar with discard and postoccupational
disturbance. What I expected we might get is the pat-
tem we see when we piece-plot tools on numerous
floors in Mexican caves and early villages: positive
and negative associations that show up too often to
be accidental. Despite the ravages of site formation
processes, we cannot simply assume that no pattems
will be left to detect.
While we still do not have such an analysis for
Nabal Oren, many Near Eastem archaeologists have
recently published Natufian or Prepottery Neolithic
residential plans and artifact scatters, and wrestled
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
with the relationship between house type and social
organization (see, for example, Byrd 1994; Rollef-
son 1997; and many ofthe authors in Bar-Yosef and
Valla 1991 and Kuijt 2000). While not everyone
agrees on what the evidence means, a useful dialogue
is growing.
What 1 Would Do Differently Today
A lot has happened since the early 1970s, allowing
me to reflect on what I would do differently were I
to write the article today. I willlist only a few pos-
sible changes.
l. In seeking ethnographic analogies for settlements
composed of circular huts, 1 drew heavily on the
compounds of central African horticulturalists and
herders. Today 1 would rely much more heavily on
the circular hut camps ofhunters and gatherers, who
provide better analogies for the Natufians and Late
Archaic Mesoamericans. Today we have plans from
many more hunter-gatherer camps than we did in
1972 (see, for example, Binford 1983; O'Connell
1987; Yellen 1977). lronically, in the same volume
as my original paper, Woodbum ( 1972) presented the
plan of a Hadza camp that would have suited m y pur-
pose well, had I seen it before I began writing. Let
us look at it now.
Site: A dry-season camp made by Hadza hunter-
gatherers
Location: Near Ugulu hill, Tanzania
Date: October 1959
Observer: J. Woodbum (1972)
Background: In 1959, roughly 400 Hadza occupied
2,500 km2 ofbush to the east ofLake Eyasi in north-
em Tanzania. Territorial rules were sufficiently flex-
ible so that any Hadza could live, hunt, or gather
wherever he/she wanted; camps usually moved every
few weeks, and could range in size from a single per-
son to almost 100 people. The average camp, while
not a fixed unit, might hold 18 adults (Woodbum
1972:193).
The Hadza settlement system provides consider-
able information for archaeological model building.
The Hadza studied by Woodbum like to live in rock-
shelters or in the open, but avoid deep-chambered
caves because they contain insect pests. During rainy
periods they tend to retum over and over again to the
same rockshelters, but in the case of open-air camps
they prefer to choose a fresh site, because pests are
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED 419

% %

35 35

30 30
Structure 9 Structure 1O
25 25

20 20

15 15

10 10

5 5

o o
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

1. Axes, adzes, and picks 6. Burins 7. Scrapers 12. Bladelets and microliths
2. Sickle blades and knives 8. Denticulated tools 13. Planes
3. Arrowheads 9. Notched tools 14. Stone tools
4. Borers 10. Retouched flakes 15. Basalt pestles
5. Awls 11. Retouched blades 16. Obsidian blades

Figure l. Top: Prepottery Neolithic hut~ from Leve! 11 ofNahal Oreo, Israel. The dashed lines indicate terraces on the talos
slope below the cave. Bottom: Histograms comparing too! percentages iu the assemblages from a large hut (Hut 9) and a
small hut (Hut 10) at Nabal Oren. (Redrawn from Stekelis and Yizraely 1963: Figures 3 and 5.)
420 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
attracted to their previous refuse. Favored camping
areas are often identified with a landmark (such as a
prominent hill), which is given a toponym. Por exam-
ple, within a one-mile diameter surrounding the
favored landmark known as Ugulu hill, Woodbum
says that one could find traces of at least 20 camps
from previous years. Archaeologists working on
hunter-gatherers often find ancient versions of such
favored landmarks; the Mt. Carmel range in Israel
(Garrod and Bate 1937) and the Mitla "Fortress," a
chert-bearing mesa in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley (Flan-
nery and Marcus 1983:300), were the focal points
of repeated encampments.
Figure 2 shows a Hadza dry-season camp mapped
by Woodbum. The camp, roughly 28 m in diameter,
had 17 shelters. The shelters were simple, circular,
above-ground huts consisting of a framework of
branches covered with grass and "put up by the
women in an hour or two" (Woodbum 1972:194).
The place chosen for the camp was, as customary,
several miles from the nearest human neighbors and
away from the paths taken by game. While topogra-
phy and prevailing wind were taken into account, the
layout of the huts was also determined by social fac-
tors that would not likely be obvious to an archae-
ologist. Por example, Hadza custom dictates that the
hut of a married couple be placed so that the wife's
mother lives "neither too close nor too far away"
(Woodbum 1972: 197). Overall, "the arrangementof
huts within a camp is ideally pattemed in accordance
with the social relations existing between at least
sorne of the individual members of the camp"
(1972:204).
The camp shown in Figure 2 reinforces several
points I made in 1972. Sorne huts were designed to
house only one person, such as a widow/widower or
an unmarried adult; others might hold two parents
and a child. (Because Woodbum does not give the
sizes of individual huts, my artist made them all the
same size.) Thus sorne huts probably included only
a man's tool kit, others a woman's tool kit, still oth-
ers both kits. If we knew more about stylistic pref-
erences, we might even be able to suggest which huts
were occupied by a mother and daughter from the
same family. Por example, Huts b, e, and d housed
married daughters of the woman in Hut a; those
daughters had arranged their huts so as to leave their
mother "neither too close nor too far away." Assum-
ing these daughters had leamed various crafts from
their mother, the women's artifacts in Huts a, b, e,
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
The woman in Hut j has a son in Hui k and daughters in
Huts f, h, and i.
The man and woman in Hui a have daughters in
Huts b, e, and d.
The man in Hut q has a son in Hui f;
the woman in Hut q has a daughter in Hui o.
The man in Hut e has a daughter in Hui n.
Figure 2. Plan of a 1959 Hadza camp near Ugulu, Tanzania.
The social relationships of sorne of the huts' occupants are
given (redrawn from Woodburn 1972: Figure 1).
and d might show stylistic similarities. The same
could be suggested for the woman in Hut j and her
daughters in Huts f, h, and i.
2. The fact that Hadza huts are "put up by the women
in an hour or two" supports an important observa-
tion by my colleague Raymond Kelly, who is cur-
rently engaged in a reanalysis of hunter-gatherer
societies (see Kelly 2000). In Kelly's ethnographic
sample, just as in an earlier cross-cultural study by
Murdock and Wilson (1972), impermanent above-
ground huts tend to be made by women; this is inter-
esting, since it suggests that women are the ones
making the critical decisions about residence size,
shape, and location. Once huts become more labor-
intensive, however (as in the case of digging subter-
ranean foundations and lining them with drylaid
stone masonry), housebuilding becomes increasingly
the work of men. And men are even more likely to
be the builders of rectangular houses with mud or
mud brick walls (Raymond Kelly, personal com-
munication 2001; Murdock and Wilson 1972).
3. In m y 1972 paper I mentioned associations
between circular houses and impermanent settle-
ment and between rectangular houses and permanent
settlement (Robbins 1966; Whiting andAyres 1968).
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED
Unfortunately, this led sorne readers to believe that
the geometric shape of the residence was the crucial
variable. In fact, my main distinction was between
(1) societies where small huts are occupied by indi-
viduals and storage is shared and (2) societies where
larger houses are occupied by whole nuclear fami-
lies, and storage is prívate.
A major improvement, therefore, would be to
incorporate more discussion of risk and privatiza-
tion ofstorage. Only a decade after my paper, Wiess-
ner (1982)-drawing on a completely different
ethnographic sample-proposed a dichotomy that
complemented mine. She contrasted hunter-gatherer
societies in which risk is assumed at the level of the
group with those in which risk is assumed at the
level of the family.
In the first type of society, widespread pooling and
sharing of food ensures that risk and reward are
accepted by the group as a whole. Food storage is
out in the open and shared by all occupants of the
settlement, as appears to have been the case with the
Natufian and PPNA sites 1 discussed (Flannery
1972:31). There is little incentive to intensify pro-
duction in such societies, since whatever is produced
must be shared. Wiessner (1982:174) points outthat
when such a group settles, they have two basic
options. One is to build a large structure to house the
entire group, such as the communal winter houses
of the Ammassilik lnuit, or the long houses of sorne
Upper Paleolithic mammoth hunters (Soffer 1985).
Altematively, they can distribute the members of the
group through a series of smaller huts, which is what
the Hadza do; 1 suspect that this is what the occu-
pants of Nabal Oren did. Such huts are often circu-
lar, contain no storage facilities, and vary in size
depending on whether they are built for a marital pair,
an unmarried son, a widow, or one of the wives of a
polygamous headman.
The second type of society accepts risk and reward
at the level of the individual nuclear family. As Wiess-
ner (1982:173) puts it, such societies have a more
"closed" site plan, "one which has either widely
spaced household units or closed-in eating and stor-
age areas, in order to avoid the jealousy and conflict
which might arise from one household visibly hav-
ing more than another." Each nuclear family has its
own house and, most importantly, its own prívate
storage. Here exists more incentive to intensify pro-
duction, since any resulting surplus does not have to
be shared; each family decides how much or how lit-
421
tle to produce. 1 suspect that this is what we see at
most Prepottery Neolithic B (PPNB) villages, in the
upper levels at Beidha and Tell Mureybit, and at
Jarmo andAli Kosh (Flannery 1972:40-43).
In other words, sorne time between Late Natufian
and PPNB in the Near East, villages of rectangular,
nuclear family houses with prívate storage rooms
replaced encampments of irregularly sized circular
huts with shared or "group" storage. Why did this
change take place? 1suspect that Prepottery Neolithic
societies grew so fast, and settlements became so
large, that not every family considered itself closely
enough related to its neighbors to be willing to share
the risks and rewards of production. Privatization of
storage-which can even include the closing off of
outdoor work space with a mud wall (Flannery 1972:
Figure 5)-is a way of freeing one 's family from hav-
ing to share with less-productive neighbors. And for
the rest of the Neolithic period, families who were
willing to work harder and store the products pri-
vately began to outdistance their neighbors eco-
nomically.
4. Colleagues working in Egypt and the Southwest
U.S. have pointed out tome that it is not necessary
to abandon circular residences in order to privatize
storage: you simply have to make the circular houses
larger and bring the storage inside. Predynastic Egyp-
tians continued to live in circular, semisubterranean
houses long after their neighbors in the Levant had
adopted rectangular residences. The Predynastic
houses were variable in size, with many being large
enough to accommodate a family; others appear to
have been used for storage (see for example Brun-
ton and Caton-Thompson 1928).
Wills ( 1992) makes a similar point in his contrast
between Shabik'eschee village (Chaco region) and
the SU si te (Mogollon region). Shabik' eschee had
circular pithouses that seem too small for entire fam-
ilies (average floor area, 17.8 m2) and have no inter-
na! storage pits. At the SU site, while many pithouses
were still curvilinear, they averaged 40 m2 and could
be as large as 80m2. These larger pithouses, which
could accommodate a nuclear family, had storage pits
inside the house that were presumably prívate. These
storage pits provided an average of 2.8 m3 storage
capacity per house, which Wills (1992: 165) converts
to 253 kg of maize-enough, he reckons, for a fam-
ily of five for three months.
Wills suspects that increasing dependence on agri-
422 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
culture is somehow involved in the shift to privatized
storage, and he raises a number of intriguing possi-
bilities. He cites Plog's (1990) suggestion that while
agriculture can raise the productivity of an economy,
it often does so at the cost of increasing variance
around the mean output. He further draws on Win-
terhalder' s ( 1990) conclusion that farmers are better
off restricting their sharing to closely related indi-
viduals because-since farmers have production
cycles lasting months or years-it is hard to moni-
tor people who "cheat" by not contributing as much
as they receive. To this 1would add a point made ear-
lier in this paper: as villages grow, not all families
are closely enough related by blood or marriage to
be willing to share with neighbors.
Finally, Wills (1992:169) argues that reduced
sharing, more restricted land tenure, and growing pri-
vatization of storage greatly increased the economic
options of early farmers. If this is so, we might expect
to see in the archaeological record a lot more varia-
tion in house size, house shape, storage facilities, rit-
ual buildings, burial patterns, and other features. (1
should add here that archaeologists working on
ancient states, like Sumer or the Inca, find even
greater variety in storage strategies than 1 discuss
here. Most of those strategies, however, were not
options for foragers or Neolithic farmers.)
5. Kohler (1993:280), also drawing on Southwest
U.S. data, warns against a simple equation between
( 1) foraging societies and communal storage/pro-
duction and (2) agriculturalists and household stor-
age/production. Citing evidence from stable-carbon
isotopes and coprolite analyses, he argues that dif-
ferences in agriculture alone cannot explain the dif-
ferences in architecture between the Chaco and
Mogollon settlements. (In a later section of this paper,
1 examine differences between Zapotec and Mixe set-
tlements in Mexico, which also refiect cultural vari-
ables beyond the commitrnent to maize agriculture.
lt appears that, far back in time, human agents made
strategic decisions among alternatives for reasons
which are not always apparent archaeologically.)
Just as Wiessner (1982) calls attention to varia-
tion among hunter-gatherers in the level at which risk
is shared, Kohler (1993:280) points to variation in
the kinds of foods foraging people are willing to
share. For example, among the Ache, Machiguenga,
and Yanomamo, things that come in "big packages"
(like major game and fish) are shared, while things
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
that come in "small packages" (like plants gathered
by women) are not. Thus, ifhorticulture emerged in
Southwest economies asan extension of women's
gathering activity, "its products may not be so widely
shared among households, particularly if production
variance was low" ( 1993:280). The implication is that
it is not enough to know whether a commitment to
agriculture has been made; we must also know
whether a product was considered men's or women's
work.
6. According to Kohler (1993:281), "the first settle-
ments in the Southwest that clearly correspond to
Flannery's rectangular-house type appeared in the
northern Southwest aboutA.D. 760." Storage by this
time was "clearly associated with the household"
(1993:281) and circular pit structures were evolving
into ritual buildings, often shared by 2-3 households
who now lived in rectangular surface structures. (In
a later section of this paper we will see a circular
building type which may have played a similar role
in the early Near East.)
The transition from circular to rectangular houses
in the Southwest U.S. has been described for the
Anasazi of the Four Corners region by Gross ( 1992 ).
The Tres Bobos subphase (A.D. 600-700) had rela-
tively shallow circularpithouses with antechambers,
accompanied by round-to-oval freestanding surface
rooms of brush and mud. During the Sagehill sub-
phase, pithouses became deeper and were more
nearly square; surface structures also became more
nearly square, and had a more substantial super-
structure. By the time of the Dos Casas subphase
(A.D. 760-850), pit structures had become square
and had vents rather than antechambers. Single
dwelling sites had given way to multiple dwelling
units of rectangular rooms. Surface rooms formed
contiguous blocks, with larger rectangular rooms in
front and smaller rectangular rooms behind them. By
now it was clear that the back row of rooms were
substantial storage structures with post-supported
roofs and stone slab-reinforced walls, while pit-
structure function had changed from residential to
ritual.
Based on these Southwestern data, were 1 to
rewrite my 1972 paper, 1 would reinforce the point
that architectural changes depended on many vari-
ables-sorne economic, sorne social-and that in
sorne regions, storage rooms might be better built
than the houses they accompanied.
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED
7. We have already mentioned the fact that circular
huts lasted longer in Egypt than in the Near East. Fur-
ther evidence that replacement by rectangular houses
could take place at any time period comes from the
Trans-Caucasus region of Azerbaijan and the Geor-
gian Republic. There Sagona (1993) reports that
sixth-millennium B.C. Neolithic settlements like
Shulaveris Gora had circular-hut compounds of sun-
dried mud brick (and sorne wattle-and-daub ), partly
subterranean. Houses were small (5-7m2) and had
even smaller storage cells (1.25-2.0 m 2) attached to
them, either directly or by a wattle-and-daub fence.
These communities resembled the encampments of
the Hadza or Natufians, in that many huts were too
small to have housed a family.
By the early Bronze Age (early fifth- to middle
fourth-millennium B .C.), sites like Kvatskhelebi had
standardized, rectangular two-room houses with
rounded corners. These houses were of wattle-and-
daub over aframework of posts; while the main room
was clearly residential, the second room may have
been an attached rectangular porch. The floor space
of these houses was 25-40 m 2, adequate for a nuclear
family. Each house had a beaten clay floor, a central
circular hearth, anda bench set against the back wall.
This transition from circular huts to nuclear fam-
ily houses took place relatively late in the Trans-
Caucasus. Sagona (1993) attributes the more
ephemeral-looking Neolithic compounds to the fact
that transhumant herding mitigated against perma-
nent settlements. By the BronzeAge, there were per-
manent settlements of nuclear-family households at
lower elevations, while the higher elevations still had
less-permanent settlements for the summer pastur-
ing of animals. We should thus bear in mind that the
relative importance of herding in a mixed farming-
herding economy can be another variable influenc-
ing house design and settlement type.
8. Several colleagues have pointed out that the shift
in risk acceptance from group to family was not irre-
versible; changing economic conditions could revive
both earlier house types and patterns of risk accep-
tance. 1 will mention only one well-documented case.
On the Deccan Plateau of western India, farmers
ofthe Early Jorwe phase (1400-1000 B.C.) lived in
large, rectangular houses with wattle-and-daub walls
over a low mud foundation (Dhavalikar 1988).
Houses had 15-35 m 2 offloor space, with the larger
ones divided into two rooms by partition walls. This
423
is considered a period of relative prosperity, with
cereal agriculture and herding supported by adequate
rainfall.
In the Late Jorwe phase, however, it is believed
that a drop in rainfall at 1000--700 B.C. led to a
"decline in agriculture" and "resulting poverty"
(Dhavalikar 1988:20). As Late Jorwe peoples turned
toa semi-nomadic herding economy, the large houses
of the previous period gave way to small circular huts,
which tended to occur in clusters of 3-4 or more.
The huts were of perishable material, though post-
molds were found along the edges of the floor. Larger
huts seem to have been for humans, while smaller
ones were for domestic animals. Most significantly,
the hearths and storage bins were located where they
could be shared by whole clusters of huts (Dhava-
likar 1988: 13). Dhavalikar attributes the changes of
Late Jorwe to deteriorating economic conditions,
which is reasonable in this case; elsewhere in the
world, of course, there could be alternative reasons
for a shift to semi-nomadic herding.
9. Finally, were 1 to rewrite the paper today, 1 would
be able to draw on a much wider range of formulae
for calculating population from floor space. In my
original paper lchose touse Naroll's (1962) straight-
forward measure of 10m2 of roofed space per per-
son, while mentioning Cook and Heizer's (1968)
suggested improvement (2 m 2 per person up to six
persons, thereafter 10 m 2 perperson). Now LeBlanc
( 1971) has offered bis own improvement toNaroll' s
approach, and Watson (1979) and Kramer (1979)
have derived formulae from the ethnoarchaeology
of the Near East. For that same part of the world,
Henry Wright now recommends the figure of 1.2
persons per room, which emerges from Gremliza's
( 1962) study of present-day Iranian villages (Henry
Wright, personal communication, 1998). While each
of these authors' approaches is different, none of
them doubts the existence of a relationship between
population and floor space. 1 suspect that while more
sophisticated measures work well in the regions
from which they were derived, it is probably all right
to use a simple method when working in a less-stud-
ied area.
Taking the Next Step: From Nuclear to
Extended Households
Having considered a number of improvements to my
1972 paper, let me now examine the next step in the
424 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
o 1 2m
1 1 1
Figure 3. Prototypic nuclear family house from Operation
IX, Level2, at Matarrah, Iraq (redrawn from Braidwood et
al. 1952:Figure 3).
evolution of sorne villages-the emergence of the
extended household.
For the period 6500--5500 B.C. (uncalibrated) in
the Near East, the house shown in Figure 3 would be
prototypical. It could easily accommodate a farnily of
five and had larger rooms for sleeping or for enter-
taining visitors, plus at least one smaller room for pri-
vate storage. Indeed, in many parts of the world,
nuclear households like this one continued for thou-
sands of years to be the basic units of which villages
were composed. However, in sorne regions- includ-
ing both the Near East and Mesoamerica-they were
gradual! y replaced by households that could have held
15-20 people, or even more. Sorne of those larger
households had multiple hearths, multiple kitchens,
multiple sets of features and storage facilities. It
appears that as sorne offspring reached adulthood and
married, they remained attached to the parental house-
hold ratherthan moving away to form their own. 1 will
devote the rest of this paper to that next stage of vil-
lage development, the replacement of nuclear house-
holds by extended farnily households.
One can think of severa! reasons why extended
households might emerge. The most obvious is eco-
nomic: in sorne subsistence systems, the nuclear fam-
ily is simply nota viable economic unit. In many parts
of the Near East, married sons remain attached to the
household of their father because the combination
of two tasks--cereal agriculture and the grazing of
herd animals-requires a division of labor beyond
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
the capacity of a nuclear farnily. By 5500 B.C. many
Near Eastem villages not only grew wheat, barley,
lentils, and peas for food, but also raised ftax for linen
and had added cattle and pigs to the herding of sheep
and goats. A farnily of 15-20 simply had more man-
power to perform all the disparate tasks in such an
economy, which could include sorne kind of craft
production as well. Between 5500 and 5000 B.C.,
sorne parts of the Near East developed households
that were not only 1arge, but had stereotyped ground
plans and a trimodal room-size distribution.
Extended households also emerged in Formative
Mesoamerica, but there we cannot argue that it was
encouraged by a mixed farming-herding economy.
Rather, it appears that genuine strategic differences
in land clearance and agriculturallandholding devel-
oped, even between neighboring cultures in broadly
similar environments. Sorne groups chose to accept
risk at the level of the individual farnily or farm-
stead; others chose to buffer risk by collaborating in
larger social groups.
In a classic study, geographer Osear Schmieder
(1930) contrasted the agricultura! strategies of the
Zapotec and Mixe peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Among the Mixe, he noted, each farnily cleared the
land it needed for cultivation and built its house
beside its fields. The settlement pattem became one
of isolated farmsteads, where each family "was con-
fronted by all the tasks of everyday life" and "the
distance from neighbor to neighbor was often great"
(Schmieder 1930:77). In contrast, Zapotec families
collaborated in clearing land by means oflarge work
groups, then distributed the land among the families
who participated. Because the big work gangs moved
from place to place, a farnily who participated could
wind up owning parcels of land scattered through
severa! environments. This process not only spread
risk among many families, it also minimized the
chances that a local environmental disaster would
damage all of a farnily's plantings. As Schmieder
points out, it also promoted the growth of large, per-
manent villages; since there was no point in moving
one' s house to fields that were scattered over so large
an area, families continued to live within the larger
cooperating group. In these larger and more compact
villages, "a differentiation of activities became pos-
sible. Crafts, art, and science developed and were
maintained by the mass ofthe population which nev-
ertheless remained agricultura!" (Schmieder
1930:76).
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED
Another variable leading to extended households
in Mesoamerica was elite status. Elite families of the
Middle Formative (850-500 B.C., uncalibrated)
tended to have bigger houses, more outbuildings,
and more storage facilities, which were often built
of adobe rather than wattle-and-daub (Marcus and
Flannery 1996:131-138). Having more members
allowed a chiefly extended family to produce more
food and more craft goods.
In his analysis of Moala, an island in Fiji, Sahlins
( 1962) discovered many of the same principies seen
among the Zapotec by Schmieder. In the village of
Keteira, forest clearing was done by large work gangs
and had led toa "traditional pattem of dispersed land
use" by extended families. Indeed, independent
nuclear family existence could be "hazardous,"
depending as it did on the productive ability of only
one adult of each sex. Inequalities in subsistence pro-
duction among nuclear households could be "miti-
gated through extended family pooling of labor and
goods" (Sahlins 1962:123). As among the Zapotec,
extended families could mobilize a large labor force
when needed, or could "release sorne men for work
in distant gardens without hardship for those remain-
ing in the village" (1962:124).
The pressure to maintain large extended families
was even greater if one were a chief in Moala, since
the chief's household was expected to produce
reserves of food for externa! distribution. Thus,
A large extended family embracing effective
gardeners jealous of their social prerogatives
maintains a chief's strength; it enables him to
produce, to accumulate, and to distribute as a
chief should. Thus the chiefly family of Naroi,
paramount on the island, with six nuclear con-
stituents is twice the size and more of other
houses of the village [Sahlins 1962: 125].
In the next section of this paper, we willlook at
three archaeological examples of early extended
households, one from the Near East and two from
Mesoamerica. The firstexample is particularly infor-
mative, because it shows us five consecutive stages
in the transition from nuclear to extended families.
Name: Tell Hassuna (Levels le-V)
Location: In the arable Y created by two seasonal
wadis whichjoin a tributary ofthe Tigris, 30 km south
of Mosul, Iraq. Hassuna lies on the border between
the cultivated Assyrian plain and the arid grazing
lands of the al-Jazireh.
425
Probable date: 5500-5100 B.C. (uncalibrated)
Excavators: Lloyd and Safar (1945)
Description: The extent of the Level le village is hard
to estimate, but may have been 1.0-1.5 ha. The site
later grew into a rectangle 200 by 150m (3.0 ha) in
extent. Levels le-V reflect a fully sedentary village
of mud-brick houses, with the kind of mixed econ-
omy one would expect at the "edge area" between
alluvium and grazing land.
Storage facilities: U seful information is provided
by circular storage bins at Hassuna, of which more
than 30 were found. The excavators describe these
as unfired storage jars (.6-1.5 m in diameter, with a
mean of about 1.0 m) whose thick walls were made
from straw-tempered clay. Outside, they were heav-
ily coated with bitumen (natural asphalt); in sorne
cases they were also given a coat of gypsum plaster
on the interior. They had been constructed above
ground, but instead ofbeing fired they were lowered
into a pit until their mouths were level with the floor,
then fixed in place with fill. Decayed chaff and car-
bonized grain inside the bins suggest their use as
grain silos, with broken bowls used as dippers to
remove grain when needed.
Using the formula for the volume of a sphere, one
can esti mate the capacity of these storage bins to have
ranged between .11 and l. 77 m 3, with a mean of .52
m 3. The largest number recovered in any level was
six, with an estimated total capacity of 3,120 liters.
If we assume that a typical nuclear family consisted
of 5 persons (2 of them children), this quantity of
grain could have satisfied the annual cereal require-
ments for half a dozen nuclear families. The storage
bins therefore provide a second line of evidence for
extended households, independent of the architec-
tural plan.
Architectural stratigraphy: Few sites document
the emergence of the extended household as clearly
as Hassuna. The earliest buildings at the site (Lev-
els lb and le) were apparent nuclear family houses
of 3-5 rooms. Although each house might share a
courtyard with one or two others, each seemed to be
a small, self-contained unit. By Level III, however,
there were irregular complexes of 15-20 rooms
flanking 2-3 sides of an open court. Often one part
of the complex looks more "planned" than the rest,
as if it were an original nucleus to which later rooms
were added by accretion. What may be implied is
that as families grew, they did not fission when they
reached 5-6 members, their offspring moving away
426 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
N=76
Tri modal at 2, 1O, & 15 (T = -5.08)
Totals
for
levels
IC-V
O Room [Q] Courtyard
Figure 4. Sizes of all measurable rooms and courts in Levels le-V at Hassuna, Iraq, rounded to the nearest square meter.
Note the trimodality at 2m2, 10m2, and 15 m2•
to construct a new house. lnstead, new rooms were
gradually added (according tono set plan) until the
house could accommodate a dozen, or even 15-20,
persons. Within this complex, the presence of sev-
eral storage rooms and several kitchens in different
parts of the building suggests that meals were being
prepared for several subgroups (nuclear families?).
Finally, in Levels IV and V, we see residential com-
plexes of 15-20 rooms whose layout appears more
planned. Rather than allowing the compounds to
grow haphazardly, the architects now knew in
advance that they needed to house more than a
nuclear family. Not only was the layout more regu-
lar, it involved a trimodal distribution of room sizes
that is statistically significant; a Student's T test
shows that the chance of the trimodality being ran-
dom is less than .001, based on a sample of 76 rooms.
The three main room types are (a) squarish rooms
with an average of2 m2 of ftoor space, likely for stor-
age; (b) elongated rooms with an average of 1O m2
of ftoor space, probably for sleeping or working; and
(e) rooms averaging 15m2 or larger, most of them
probably courts (Figure 4).
Level le (Figure 5). In an exposure of just under
500m2, Lloyd and Safar (1945) found parts ofthree
nuclear family houses. Flanking an open courtyard
with storage bins of the type described above, the
houses were equipped with ovens and heavy stone
mortars. The northernmost house had roughly 25 m2
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
x=6.7 s.d. = 6.1
--------------
[1] Possible courtyard
ofbounded space divided into 5-6 rectangular units,
the largest of which might have been an interior
court. Levellc also produced the partial plan of a cir-
cular building whose function could not be deter-
mined. Similar buildings, called by the Greek term
tholoi, occur at other si tes of the same period. While
excavators differ in their interpretation of tholoi, most
consider them ritual buildings associated with groups
of related households. 1
Level 11 (Figure 6). This level produced a com-
plex of 18-20 rooms arranged around two sides of
an open area. Here Lloyd and Safar clearly felt that
they were dealing with two previously separate
dwelling units that had coalesced over time. The
southem sector seems to preserve the plan of a
nuclear household with an open court, a large room
for sleeping or receiving visitors (lO m 2), a pair of
elongated rooms (3.5-5 m2) with an oven, anda pair
of squarish rooms (3-4 m2), at least one of which
was for storage. The northem part of the complex
resembles a house that had formerly consisted of
four large rooms (1 0-16 m2) surrounded by much
smaller ones (1-5 m 2), at least sorne of which were
for storage.
Level m (Figure 7). A 500 m2 exposure of this
level produced the partial plans of two mud-brick
houses separated by a narrow alley. The house to the
west had more than 80 m2 of bounded space, and
looked like a former nuclear family house that had
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED 427

grown haphazardly to extended family size. One

doorway, perhaps the primary entrance, had a paved
threshold with a stone socket on which the door had
pivoted. Once again, the basic components of the
house were large, elongated rooms (12-15 m 2 )
accompanied by smaller, usually squarish rooms
( 1.5-6 m2). Large storage bins were set in the floors
of rooms and courtyards; most would have had vol-
umes of .5 m3 or more, and the total capacity of the
six shown in or near the westem house would have
been greater than 3,120 liters.
Level IV (Figure 8). Level IV yielded an
extended family household that appeared to have
been planned rather than growing by accretion. It
occupied three sides of a 15 m2 courtyard, with the
eastem sector providing the most symmetrical plan.
Lloyd and Safar (1945:274) described that unit of
five rooms anda corridor as similar to the houses of
present-day villages in the area; a slightly larger cen-
tral room (4.5 m2) with an oven was flanked on the
south by paired elongated rooms (each 3.5 m2), and
on the north by paired squarish rooms (each 1.5 m2).
Figure 5. Plan of nuclear family houses around an open The latter (presumably storage rooms) were filled
court in Leve! le at Hassuna (redrawn from Lloyd and Safar with restorable pottery. Attached to the eastem unit
1945:Figure 28). were less-uniform rooms, one of which may have
been a walled, outdoor work area with three mortars
and an oven. There were at least three hearths and
four ovens spaced around the household, suggesting
N the presence of several kitchens. This building must
Mortar
1 have had more than 80 m2 under roof, and if all the
surrounding courtyards were associated with it, there
were over 120m2 ofbounded space. This is enough
space to give usan estimate of 8-12 persons using
Naroll's method, and there are enough rooms to give
us 18 persons using Wright's method. Based on the
Possible plaeement of ovens and hearths, 1 suspect that we
court area
with jars, are dealing with an extended household of perhaps
0 flint chipping three related nuclear families, each of which ground
debris, etc.
its own grain and cooked its own gruel or bread, but
also shared storage and work space with coresidents.
Sm Level V (Figure 9). This 1evel yielded a house
that appears to have been planned from the outset to
accommodate an extended family. More than 140m2
-••• ofbounded space give usan estimate of 14-15 per-

-
1 -t•
Figure 6. Irregular extended household from Leve! ll at
Hassuna (redrawn from Lloyd and Safar 1945:Figure 29).
sons by Naroll's method, and there are enough rooms
to provide an estimate of 20 persons by Wright's
method. In Level V, the trimodal room-size distrib-
ution is particularly clear; there are big, elongated
rooms (10m2), courts (>15m2 ), and small, squarish
cubicles (2-4 m 2). Lloyd and Safar saw the critical
428 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY [Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002

N
t
••

•
•••

¡. . Jt-"""
•• ••
(j) L ...:::
• •
-
Storage~
~~ 5m

Figure 7. Irregular extended household from Leve! III at Hassuna (redrawn from Lloyd and Safar 1945:Figure 30).

N
Oven
(j ;;arth +········-• t
COURT ---
•
:
•
f
N

couRr

"l Sm

0 oven
Figure 8. Extended household with a more planned appear-
ance from Level IV at Hassuna (redrawn from Lloyd and
Safar 1945:Figure 31).
5m
Figure 9. Extended household with a more planned appear-
ance from Level V at Hassuna (redrawn from Lloyd and
Safar 1945:Figure 32).
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED
division in this household as the long, unbroken east-
west wall that bisects it. South of that wall lay a
series of elongated rooms, the largest of which had
two storage bins and was considered by the excava-
tors to be a court.
Village Density. The stratigraphic sequence at
Hassuna suggests that pressure to create extended
households preceded any formalization of the ground
plan. The creation of such residences also has impli-
cations for increasing village population density.
Assuming that Lloyd and Safar's 500-m2 exposure
is representative of the en tire site, we can estímate
the density of the Level le village as somewhere
between 90 and 200 persons per hectare. With the
haphazard growth of extended households like those
of Level 111, estimates range from 200 persons
(Naroll's method) to 250 persons (Wright's method)
per ha. With the planned extended households of
Level V, our estimates reach 280 persons (Naroll) to
400 persons (Wright) per ha. Whether or not one
accepts the actual estimates--calculated with diffi-
culty from fragmentary ground plans-it is clear that
planned, extended family households can produce
much higher densities.
By 5000 B. C. (uncalibrated), the village ofChoga
Mami in eastem Iraq had even more standardized and
symmetrical residences of up to 12 rooms, neatly
arranged in four rows of three (Oates 1969).
Extended Households in Mesoamerica
Most houses in early Mesoamerican villages were
of wattle-and-daub, making them harder to find and
analyze than Near Eastem houses. After 850 B.C.
(uncalibrated), however, elite families began increas-
ingly to build adobe houses, often over a foundation
of field stones. From that point on the growth of
extended households becomes easier to document,
as we see in the following examples from Puebla and
Oaxaca, Mexico.
Name: Llano Perdido
Location: Near Dominguillo in the southem Cañada
de Cuicatlán, Oaxaca. The elevation is about 700 m,
and the setting is arid tropical thom forest.
Date: Perdido phase, 600-200 B. C. (uncalibrated)
Excavators: Spencer and Redmond (1997:Chapter
7)
Description: Llano Perdido covers 2.25 ha and is
considered a secondary center, part of a chiefdom
whose primary center was Site Cs 19. The commu-
429
nity was organized into four large residential com-
pounds, each measuring 30-40 m on a side and sep-
arated from other compounds by about 25 m of open
space. Within each compound there seems to have
been a series of modular units, usually consisting of
4-5 small buildings surrounding a common patio.
The excavators suspect that each patio group was
occupied by an extended household of 10-15 peo-
ple and that each compound consisted of 6--9 such
households, united by shared descent. The largest res-
iden ce in each compound is believed to have held a
"lineage head" who was the highest-ranking mem-
ber of the compound.
Llano Perdido is a shallow site that was aban-
doned after having been bumed in a raid, leaving
wooden posts carbonized and the stone foundations
of adobe houses intact. The compound in Area AIB
was extensively excavated, revealing 18 structures
arranged around three patios (Spencer and Redmond
1997:Fig. 7.2). The Southwest Patio group seems to
have included the lineage head's residence (House
7) and his well-stocked tomb. It al so produced a cer-
emonial platform (Structure 6) and three units
(Houses 8, 9, 10) that could plausibly be interpreted
as chiefty storehouses.
The South Patio Group. 1have chosen the South
Patio Group to illustrate (Figure 10). lts occupants
were presumably less highly ranked than the lineage
head 's family, but their residence illustrates the stan-
dard module including a patio, three houses, and a
likely ritual structure on a platform. The patio itself
measured 48 m 2 and contained a number of post-
molds from probable ramadas or shaded work areas.
Features 36 and 37 were large metates for outdoor
grinding.
House 1 measured 15.4 m2 and had been built of
adobes over a stone foundation. A single step led
from the patio to the house, and postmolds nearby
suggested that the entrance may have been shaded
by an awning or thatched-roof extension. There was
a hearth in the southwest comer of the house, accom-
panied by sherds of coma/es or tortilla griddles.
House 2 measured 13m2, and its walls were also
of adobe over stone foundations. It contained domes-
tic refuse and had been divided into two rooms of
unequal size, apparently separated by a wattle-and-
daub wall.
House 40, also of adobe over stone, had a step
like that of House 1 and a similar pattem of exterior
postmolds suggesting an awning or roof extension.
430 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
~p~ <-........._
~ ~¡35 ~OS'F.32
.JF.1a~ H.40
F.20 .~~o ~1.31 • r~:
• • }, &"'1,.'0
• •
0F.36 ~--
. . li '
:S. Patio. ~ Str. 16 :
~~Qm, OF.31 • ~
ltiJ r
5m
Figure 10. Stone wall foundations ofthe South Patio Group,
part of the Area AIB residential compound at Uano Perdido
near Dominguillo, Oaxaca. During the Perdido phase
(600-200 B.C.), such patio groups were the modules from
which larger residential compounds were assembled
(redrawn from Spencer and Redmond 1997:Figure 7.2).
At sorne point a wattle-and-daub annex, called House
35, had been added to House 40; it contained ash
from a cooking brazier (Feature 18) and a small
"curb" of stone slabs framing sorne kind of work area
(Feature 20).
Structure 16, a raised platform made from 6-7
courses of stones, sat directly across the patio from
House l. Sorne 80 cm high, it featured a stairway of
perhaps 3-4 steps and had likely been topped with
a ritual structure of sorne kind.
Economic Factors. Analyses of the flow of trade
goods at Llano Perdido suggest that lineage heads
were the conduits through which items like obsid-
ian and marine shell reached the lower-ranked fam-
ilies in their compound (Spencer 1982). Such
families were not simply engaged in subsistence agri-
culture, such as the growing of maize; botanical
remains suggest that they were also engaged in the
growing of tropical orchard crops for export to tem-
perate regions like Tehuacán and the Valley of Oax-
aca. Examples inelude the fruits of the black zapote
(Diospyros digyna) and the nuts of the coyol palm
(Acrocomia mexicana) (Spencer and Redmond
1997:600). Two labor-intensive activities at La Coy-
otera-irrigation of tree crops for export and the con-
version of marine shell into prestige goods-may
[Vol. 67, No. 3, 2002
have provided additional incentives for the growth
of large extended families.
Name: Tetimpa
Location: 15 km west of Cholula, Puebla, on the
lower slope of the Popocatépetl volcano at an ele-
1
1
vation of ca. 2,350 m.
Probable date: Late Tetimpa phase, 50 B.C.-A.D.
1
100 (uncalibrated)
Excavators: Plunket and Uruñuela (1998)
Description: During the Late Tetimpa phase, many
i
square kilometers of the slopes below Popocatépetl
were occupied by maize fields and communities of
modular households. The pattern ofboth houses and
fields is remarkably well preserved below the vol-
canic ash from an eruption dating to the first century
A.D.
In order to prevent erosion of fine sandy soil on
the sloping terrain during heavy summer rains, farm-
ers at Tetimpa mounded earth around their plants,
creating "sequences of linear ridges that look very
similar to the furrows of modern plowed fields"
(Plunket and Uruñuela 1998:289). Households were
spaced 6-86 m apart and were often bordered by their
furrowed fields (Figure 11). The standard occupa-
tional module consisted of a low platform on which
a central patio was flanked by 2-3 houses, set atright
angles to one another. When families at Tetimpa
needed more space, they added another entire mod-
ular unit nearby.
In addition to maintaining a consistent astro-
nomical orientation, Tetimpa households had a
bimodal room-size distribution. Larger central
houses, facing the entrance to the module, ranged
from 16--17.5 m 2; houses to either side of them
ranged from 7.5 -9.5 m 2• Individual houses were of
wattle-and-daub over low stone platforms, with a
simple staircase ascending from the central patio. In
cases where there was no third house on a modular
platform, its place was taken by a group of storage
jars or a series of above-ground, mud-and-wicker
storage bins, known as cuexcomates in the language
of the later Aztec. The wattle of both walls and stor-
age bins had been burned in situ by hot volcanic ash,
providing exceptional architectural detail.
In the sector of Tetimpa known as Cruz Verde,
the excavators found an extended household com-
posed of at least two functionally complementary
modules. Operation 12 of the household seemed to
include the principal residential rooms, while Oper-
Flannery] THE ORIGINS OF THE VILLAGE REVISITED
Furrowed
Agricultura! Fields
·····/·¡·····}·········.:·
...........................
···········- ···············.
·················· ·········
.................. ·······.
Figure 11. Simplified plan of Operation 10 in the Cruz Verde section of Tetimpa, Puebla. This modular group is part of an
extended household which also included Operation 12 (redrawn from Plunket and Uruñuela 1998:Figure 10).
ation 10 (less than 10m away) had the appearance
of a kitchen and storage area. 1 have chosen to fea-
ture Operation 1O (Figure 11) because it illustrates
the placement of storage bins, the density of pots in
the kitchen, and the proximity of the furrowed corn-
fields to the residence. Operation 10 had an atypi-
cally high number of pots and storage bins for its size;
it makes sense only as part of an extended house-
hold, which included Operation 12 (Plunket and
Uruñuela 1998:298).
Tetimpa reinforces a number of principies seen
in other extended-family communities: (1) its house-
holds could grow by accretion, like those ofHassuna
11-III; yet (2) when the villagers did add more space,
it was according to a modular plan like the Patio
Groups of Llano Perdido; and (3) within each
Tetimpa module there were rooms of relatively stan-
dard sizes, like those of Hassuna IV-V. Tetimpa thus
combines the ftexibility of"growth on demand" with
the formality of a stereotypic module.
Conclusions and Future Developments
Over the last three decades it has become clear that
sedentary life in many parts of the ancient world
began with settlements of circular huts like those of
the precerarnic Near East. Although the timing was
different from region to region, many of those early
431
2m
Unit 1
N...,-
Unit2
settlements were eventually replaced by villages of
rectangular, nuclear family houses.
lt now appears, however, that the reasons for this
replacement of one settlement type by another are
too varied for a singlemodel to explain. Included are
(1) shifts in risk acceptance between the group and
the nuclear farnily, (2) increases or decreases in
dependence on agriculture, (3) privatization of stor-
age, and possibly even (4) shifts between polyga-
mous and monogamous marriage. lt also appears
that each of these shifts was reversible when condi-
tions changed. Perhaps most intriguing is the possi-
bility that two basic residential strategies may have
provided enough ftexibility to adjust toa much larger
set of variables.
In this paper we have also looked at a subsequent
stage in village development, the growth of houses
designed to hold extended families. Again, the rea-
sons for this settlement change may be varied.
Included are (1) the need for larger households to
take on the many tasks of a mixed farming/herding
economy; (2) the greater labor needs of intensive irri-
gation farmers; (3) a response to the dispersed field
systems that result from communalland clearance,
followed by division of fields among the partici-
pants; and (4) the increased size of elite households
who seek to support and direct the work of craft spe-
432 AMERICAN ANTIQUITY
cialists. Once again, a single, basic settlement type-
the village of extended households-seems to have
been flexible enough to respond to a diverse set of
variables.
In many parts of the ancient world, there was to
be yet another stage in community development:
econornic specialization, not just at the level of the
extended family, but at the level of the residential
ward. Archaeological si tes on the coast ofPeru even-
tually carne to have barrios of farmers, fishermen,
weavers, potters, and metalworkers. Classic
Mesoamerican cities like Teotihuacan had large
apartment compounds where specialized potters, or
figurine makers, or obsidian workers, or mask assem-
blers lived and worked together. In Mesopotamia,
specialists in fine pottery began to paint their prod-
ucts with identifying "potter's marks." Early cities
near the Euphrates are believed to have had wards
of farmers, herders, and fishermen. Unfortunately,
there is no space to investigate that later stage of res-
idential strategy here. It deserves an essay all its
own-perhaps on the thirtieth anniversary of this
article?
Acknowledgments. I thank editor Timothy Kohler, without
whose request this article would never have been written. The
advice of Raymond Kelly and four anonymous reviewers
greatly improved the manuscript. Charles Spencer and Elsa
Redmond gave me a tour of Llano Perdido, and Patricia
Plunket and Gabriela Uruñuela guided me around Tetimpa.
Antonio Sagona called m y attention to the architectural transi-
tion in the Trans-Caucasus, Carla Sinopoli called my attention
to the Deccan sequence, and Tim Kohler provided me with no
end of data from the American Southwest. Al! illustrations are
the work of John Klausmeyer.
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Notes
l. At Yarim Tepe 1 in northern Iraq, Merpert and
Munchaev (1993) found severa! tholoi in levels of the
Hassunan period. In their opinion, these circular structures
"cannot be classed as dwellings either by their size, form, or
contents" (Merpert and Munchaev 1993:95); they consider
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region where, as in the Southwest U.S., sorne round struc-
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developed.
Received October 17, 2001; Revised February 15, 2002;
Accepted February 19, 2002.