Di Castro (INTRO) Housing and Habitat Babesch Suppl 26 PROOF full text (2025)

"Housing in the Iron Age Mediterranean. Phoenician's ways of inhabiting from the Levant to Sicily" (Conference Program: XXIV Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology "Ideas that traveled by the sea")

SOMA , 2023

The way people and communities built and conceive their houses says much about their lifestyle and social organization. As the smallest nucleus of the social structure, houses and their plans reflect the cultural patterns and self-perception of a community. When Phoenicians in the 10th century BCE moved from the Levant and settled colonies all over the coasts of Mediterranean, brought with them their idea of living space and their architectural and building skills. This paper aim at framing the study of the Phoenician domestic architecture in the Mediterranean focusing on two main questions: How the Phoenicians preserved their way of dwelling by adapting to the different landscapes and environments of the Mediterranean? How the local populations readapted their architectural models, enrooted in the Bronze Age Mediterranean tradition, after the encounter with the Levantine housing conception and different architectural techniques? With this in mind, an architectural comparison is presented between some case studies comprising Levantine and Sicilian indigenous houses, in the period between the 12th and 8th centuries BCE: this will provide the cue to trace continuities, changes and mutual influences in the construction of a new idea of house, shared between Phoenician colonisers and the Sicilian indigenous population settled in the same territory.

Jennifer Baird and April Pudsey (eds.), Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Material and Textual Approaches, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022 (Book Review)

SCRIPTA CLASSICA ISRAELICA, 2023

A Theoretical Approach to Ancient Housing - Graduate School of Archaeology occasional papers 15

This publication is the result of a two-day symposium held at Leiden University at 24th and 25th of April 2014. The purpose of the symposium was to better understand and identify houses and households from available yet abstract archaeological evidence. Because of the broad nature of the subject, the best way to investigate houses and households is through a multi-disciplinary approach. This publication contains twelve papers written by the participating Research Master students and an epilogue written by key-note speaker Prof. Lisa Nevett. The papers make use of and explore the concepts of house and household, either by discussing a presented paper or by using these concepts in relation to the research of the author.

Relationship between Urban Morphology and Patio Housing in Mediterranean European Cities during the XV–XVI Centuries

Journal of Biourbanism, #1&2/17 , 2018

Through a brief analysis of the millennial use of the typological model of the patio house, the relations existing in the Mediterranean Europe between this model and the urban form during the 15 th –16 th centuries are exposed. The investigation is based on the documentary analysis and the construction phases of more than twenty traditional houses in the historic center of Granada, in the context of the newly fallen Nasrid city in the hands of the Castile Lords. It allows to appreciate the footprint of Islamic urbanism of Eastern origin in late medieval Europe, also existing in other geographical areas at that time, despite the different cultural roots, and partly still present today. This research is linked to the numerous contemporary studies that have been focusing on traditional architecture, trying also to provide a kind of reading of the constitutive processes of the medina of the Islamic West.

I wrote this paper in part to put the apartment compounds of Teotihuacan into a comparative framework. Rene Millon used to say that the apartment compounds were a unique form of housing, but I felt the need to establish that fact empirically (which is partially accomplished in this paper).

The meaning of domestic cubic forms: interpreting Cycladic housing and settlements of the period of foreign domination (ca. 1207-1821 AD)

Pharos: Journal of the Netherlands Institute at Athens, 2001

Whether there is an archaeology of medieval and post-medieval housing and households in the Aegean, is a question that has formed the introduction of many papers on the archaeology of the medieval Greek lands. Indeed, not much attention has been given to remains of the more recent periods of Greek history. Our knowledge of domestic architecture and settlement layouts of the last eight hundred years of 'Greek' history derives from studies of architects, architectural historians and folklorists. No excavation of late medieval and post-medieval settlements or houses has ever been carried out on the Aegean Islands. Yet, this geographical unit and area of research are marked by the good fortune that evidence for post-Roman settlements, domestic organisation and the use of domestic space comes from above rather than below the ground. However, pre-modern housing in the Mediterranean has never been treated as a subject for archaeology in contrast to prehistoric and classical below ground evidence. This article's contribution is a review of some previous and recent methodological approaches to the study of pre-modern standing buildings together with an attempt to test these approaches on evidence from the Aegean-Island late medieval and post-medieval housing. This paper mainly uses case studies from the Cyclades, where development does not seem to have altered the built environment very much.

Space and Collectivity in the Mediterranean Culture

Journal of Comparative Cultural Studies in Architecture, 2018

The extraordinary human invention of the city has developed and implemented some of the elements already present in the embryonic form in primi- tive residential mode: the road, the square, the market. The void as a public space, represented by places designated for sociability and collective activities, becomes the main character of the city. In parallel to that, residences were developed in different typological and formal evolutions. The introduction of the window produces a singular phenomenon, reversing the interpretation of the relationship between the private and public space in favor of the second. Street and square became the places of the highest urban expression and identity. Around these “voids” develop the social, commercial, philosophical and political activities, which have made the Mediterranean culture the essence of the Western civilization for centuries. Squares, streets and markets were “adopted” even in the walled cities of the Middle Ages, superb urban synthesis of previous cultures, but here they are thought as a unit, a continuous flow of public places able of interacting with the private ones like never before. In the urban context, the houses and their adjacent areas are the natural completion of the medieval public space, which is in fact a place to meet and socialize, a ceremonial and institutional space, a work and activity space. Widely unchanged during the following centuries, the street and the square are now subject to a strong identity and functional decline, largely replaced by other “aggre- gating” forms and by other means of data exchange, services and sociability. If during the first decades of the twentieth century new housing models were elaborated, inspired by the utopian ones of the pre- vious century – residential solutions born from the potential of new building techniques and from a social interpretation of great charm – today things have deeply changed. The great collective housing designed by Le Corbusier (the Immeuble Villas be- fore and then the Unite d’Habitation) represented the highest point of these experimental housing types: these were large collectors of services and different human realities, capable of generating public and shared spaces, relations between the people and cities, new relationships between the communities and neighborhoods. In a different context that severely reduced the utopian eupho- ria of the Modern Movement, today new housing models are conceived, renouncing the public space in favor of a private one. Among them, cohous- ing is widely supported and is spreading even in contexts unrelated to its origins, particularly in the Mediterranean. These models, however, aim to develop an autonomous community, where every social relationship is circumscribed, addressed to other members of the community in an exclusivist way: a “return” to the primordial origins that could be very dangerous in the fragmented and not very cohesive context in which they are coming into existence.

Domestic space in the Mediterranean_Oxford handbook of Neolithic Europe

Differentiation in the Hellenistic Houses of Delos. The Question of Functional Areas, in: R. Westgate – N. Fisher – J. Whitley (eds.), Building Communities. House, Settlement and Society in the Aegean and Beyond. The Annual of the British School at Athens Suppl. 15 (2007) 323-334

This volume explores a range of approaches to the built environment of the ancient Mediterranean world, with two main aims: first, to relate archaeological evidence to the wider cultural and historical context, and second, to bridge the conventional divide between prehistoric and Classical archaeology. It contains 40 papers by an international array of scholars, ranging from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity, and geographically from the Aegean to Italy, North Africa, Egypt and the Black Sea. Major themes include: • the theory and methodology of analysing and interpreting built space • the relationship of the built environment to social and political structures and the formation of states • the development of civic and religious space • the identification of households in the archaeological record • the formation and interpretation of domestic assemblages • problems in the identification of functional areas within the house • changing conceptions of public and private • space and gender • the function and significance of decoration in houses and palaces • the uses of ethnoarchaeology and virtual reality for understanding architectural remains • the effects of acculturation in the domestic sphere • the archaeology of the domestic economy • the problems of combining literary and archaeological evidence.

Introduction: Approaches to the Study of Houses and Households in Ancient Crete