Pit-House Complexity: Reframing the Vernacular Architectural Traditions of Rural Hellenistic Central Asia
**This event is open to those of the anthropology community ONLY**
This talk emerges from my dissertation research and archaeological fieldwork excavating a rural farmstead in the southern Kyzylkum Desert, west of Bukhara, (Uzbekistan) – a rare example of a durable, multi-room pit-house complex with a surface level internal courtyard. Pit-houses occupy an undertheorized position in the broad study of ancient vernacular architectural traditions across the globe. In some regions, such as the pre-colonial American Southwest and the Neolithic Levant, they are recognized for their centrality in the structuring of settlement life. In other regions, such as the Eurasian steppe, pit-houses have been set into a de facto relationship with varying degrees of mobility and are sometimes discounted as a mode of durable architecture. In the ancient Classical Mediterranean, pit-houses are hardly engaged seriously within the household archaeology of the Greek and Roman world even when present in the archaeological and textual record. This talk explores the complexity of pit-house construction in western Central Asia at the end of the 1stmillennium BCE (Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic periods). Here I present excavated data from the Kyzylkum as an example of pit-house construction complexity, placing it in conversation with the broader development of rural vernacular and monumental architecture in western Central Asia. It is argued that even as a vernacular tradition, successful pit houses required specialized knowledge of ecology, practice, and tectonics that differed, but was entangled with, the construction practices of above ground architecture. As a case study, it is suggested that a better understanding of pit-house construction practices serve as one underutilized way to consider rural lifeways in the ancient world.
