A Kinship-informed Comparative and Worldwide Survey of the Multiple Residential Group

Abstract

[EN] This contribution addresses a basic and ubiquitous collective social agent in antiquity between the conjugal family –which was rarely a social unit in itself– and the settlement or local community. The paper delves into such an intermediate and kin-driven social grouping, often materialised as a neighbourhood or multi-house aggregate. The text proposes an approach from the standpoint of household archaeology, centring on kinship, with the aim of challenging unquestioned claims and to endorse the target formulas of conviviality with supportive and highly detailed historical information from diverse sources. Such residential group cannot be interpreted as an “extended family” or a “cultural trait”, nor always be reduced to a complete household or corporate unilineal group. The chapter first discusses its underpinnings and interpretative limits and then surveys the literature of two major household archaeological schools in a comparative fashion to focus on a necessarily restrictive selection of well-known and representative case studies. Out of the suite of combinations of residence and descent options, the text concentrates on those multi-functional and self-sufficient composite residential groups involving either subaltern small conjugal dwellings or elite oversized ancillary subunits: mostly virilocal and patrilineal, and some bilocal and bilateral cases, often confused. This sample ranges from decentralised pre-/protohistoric Near Eastern and Mediterranean organisations to Mesoamerican and South American historical state-based polities. Such an exercise highlights key underlying commonalities of this collective social actor in varied settings across time and space, readdresses misguided points in current archaeological literature and suggests prospects for multi-stranded research integrating the domestic and funerary realms.