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2 - Domesticating the Ancient House

The Archaeology of a False Analogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2022

By
Caspar Meyer
Edited by
J. A. Baird  and
April Pudsey
J. A. Baird
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
April Pudsey
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

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’.

Keywords

British MuseumdomesticitygenderGetty VillaGreek painted potteryhousehold archaeologyMuseo Ercolanesemuseum displayvisual narrative
Type
Chapter
Information
Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Material and Textual Approaches
 , pp. 68 - 95
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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