Men and Women in Prehistoric Architecture

Many aspects of the use and significance of space that are considered vital to the study of traditional architecture, such as gender relations in domestic space, have been minimized in the treatments of architectural remains in archaeology. This paper examines the rationale for restricting the facts of prehistoric architecture to building techniques and stylistic variability. It then attempts to overcome these limitations byan experimental interpretation of prehistoric architectural remains from Neolithic villages in Yugoslavia that addresses the social actions of men and women in domestic space. The experiment involves a different standpoint on the construction of knowledge about prehistory, the creative use of graphic representation, and a critical examination of the archaeologist as mediator between past and present. have been written on the basis of "facts" provided by archae ologists. Domestic architectural remains have been preserved in the archaeological record fo r many thousands of years. Their spatial distribution and stratigraphic sequence com prise, for many archaeologists, the main fo cus of their excava tions and the most important aspect of the archaeological record. Those historians of architecture who have been inter ested in traditional architecture and who have used this prehistoric archaeological data have written histories that are arid, uncreative and dehumanized in comparison to histories of later architecture and in comparison to the analysis of modern traditional architecture.' They have limited their histories, fo r example, to tracing the origins of building technology' or to providing evidence for the origins and diffusion of certain archetypal f oor plan fo rms.3