Steadman - Archaeology of Domestic Architecture and the Human Use of Space

Family and friends are greatly deserving of thanks for their help and support during the writing of this book. I can never thank Girish and Rose enough for all they do for me. Jenni Ross and Greg McMahon have been wonderful colleagues and friends through many field seasons and scholarly projects; their support and patience with me are deeply appreciated. Without my good friend Amanda Halliwell I would never complete anything, and I thank her for her help and generosity. Jim Weinstein's friendship and encouragement these many years is also deeply appreciated. I also wish to acknowledge Ruth Tringham in whose seminars I first developed my love of architecture. Tim Matney shares my love of architecture and has been a treasured friend over the years who has inspired me in many ways. Several scholars, particularly Ted Banning and Jerry Moore, have also inspired me in the field of architecture, and I thank them for their wonderful scholarship.

It has taken well over a decade to write this book, or more accurately, I have been hoping to write it for that long. Other scholarly agendas seemed continually to thwart pursuit of this favored subject: the archaeology of architecture. Decades ago, I intended to write my dissertation on this topic, and even completed the literature review. However, circumstances swerved my dissertation topic dramatically to a very unarchitectural topic. When finally the dissertation process and its aftermath (publication) were completed, I returned to the study of architecture. I even managed to publish the "lit review" slated to be part of the original dissertation, and published a few architecturally based articles over the years. After being hired at my college two decades ago, I taught a course on the "Archaeology of Space and Place," which I still think is one of the best courses I have ever delivered. I intended to write this book to accompany that class.

Alas, other demands at the college again led me away from architecture and toward other academic areas. Other books were written or edited, none of them really about architecture, and an archaeological project that requires regular reports and synthetic works ate up time that could otherwise have been dedicated to architecture-based studies. At long last, I turned my attention back to my favorite, and first love, the archaeology of architecture. Two years later, I am writing this introduction, with a nearly complete manuscript in its wake.

Had I managed to sit down and write this book long ago, it would have been very different from the one I have now produced. Mainly, it would have been shorter, perhaps to the delight of readers and certainly to the relief of my publisher. Very recently, the field of architecture, as explored through the archaeological discipline, has risen to prominence much as it did in the 1970s through the 1990s. The number of books and articles that have appearedreally in the last five yearson architecture and related topics is really quite remarkable, and very exciting. I hope my inclusion of many of them in my discussions throughout these chapters has done justice to their excellent scholarship.

Upon setting out to write this book, I did not quite know what its nature would turn out to be. I knew what the subjects of the chapters would be, and roughly what I would discuss in each, but I did not know if this book would become a highly theoretical treatise on humans and their built environment, or a vehicle in which I explored my own ideas about humans and their spaces, or turn into something else entirely. Now, having completed the thing, I can say that it is, essentially, all three, but mostly the latter. This volume is, in many ways, a "how-to" manual, a guide to understanding the rich data provided to archaeologists by the architectural record.