Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983 - 20

Baghestan's rooms have been transformed in just
this way.
Rooms that have not been reused are easy to
identify. The floors, walls and ceilings of living rooms
typically are plastered with white gypsum or pale
green clay over a mixture of mud and straw, and the
rooms have a central hearth and platform for a
wood-burning heater. A few living rooms have larger
casement windows and doors with glass panels.
Storeroom walls and floors, on the other hand, are
usually finished only with mud-straw plaster and
have features never seen in living rooms, such as
niches partly walled up to form deep grain bins, or
large and small clay storage bins fixed to floors or
niches. Animal rooms often have few or no wall niches.
Their interior surfaces may simply be bricks, and
the floors bare earth, since the contents will be dug
out every year and taken to the fields for fertilizer.
Feeding bins are built against the walls or in corners
-high individual bins for oxen or donkeys, long
low troughs for sheep and goats. All such newly built
rooms reveal their functions even before the owners
and their belongings have moved in.
The contents of rooms further distinguish their
uses. Except for wooden or metal chests, these village rooms do not have what we think of as furniture.
Bolsters, rugs and quilts are used for sitting and
sleeping, and boxes, clay or metal vessels, skins,
sacks, or cloths are used for storage. Other materials
and objects are found directly on the floor, in niches,
or hanging from the walls and ceilings.
Ihe structures of the village of Baghestan would
be straightforward and unambiguous were it not
for the fact that so many rooms are reused, putting
the formal elements of features, decoration and
finish out of step with their contents and functions.
For example, a room originally built and furnished
as a living room for a newly married couple may continue to be used as such for 30 years or so. When
the husband dies, however, his widow may move in
with one of her married children, and the living room
might be converted to a storage room. Or a woman
may inherit her father's storeroom in an old section of town. If the walls are cracked beyond repair,
her husband may keep his ox in it. Because of the
gradual deterioration of mudbrick architecture,
reuse is usually a one-way trip. Only very rarely might
an animal room be converted to a storeroom or a
room for grain storage to a living room.
The history of a room can often be read from its
appearance. Some storerooms have central hearths
or white plastered walls usually associated with
living rooms, a straw storeroom may have a built-in
support for a loom warp in its back shelf, and an
animal room the remains of carved plaster niches.
Such features would not be useful for identifying a
room's most recent use. They tend to preserve,
albeit in a state of deterioration, remnants of past
activities side by side with those of current activities,
and give a misleading appearance of contemporaneity to events which may in fact have taken place
years apart. Baghestan women no longer weave, for
example- and when they did, 20 years ago and
more, it was in storerooms and living rooms, never in
straw storage rooms or animal rooms, where warp
supports and weaving paraphernalia are sometimes
20 ARCHAEOLOGY

found today. Other traits, however, may be considered diagnostic. With a high degree of probability,
they are found in certain types of rooms, and in
those types only. Such diagnostic features include
large windows, rugs, wall hangings, and heaters for
living rooms; storage bins, wheat and other grains,
and tobacco and cotton for storage rooms; and
feed bins and dung for animal rooms.
Even in this "live" village setting, there is no
precisely contemporary moment as far as material
culture is concerned. Groundstone tools and architecture illustrate rather dramatically the problems
that would face an archaeologist of the future. Other
examples from village life in Baghestan would also
support the conclusion that even before a site is
abandoned objects, functions and contexts may become confused and could lead to several kinds of
error in inference. First, functional identifications
of tool types and room types based on many commonly used criteria will not accurately reflect behavior or activities in a place where recycling is practiced.
Second, there will be an apparent accumulation of
activities which in fact are well separated in time.
Third, objects are likely to be dated inaccurately. And
when these objects, spaces and activities are used
for purposes such as estimating population size
or determining the proportion of agricultural to pastoral activities, the results will be skewed by the
intrusion of the past into the present. Living rooms,
for example, are generally good indicators of the
number of households in a village, which is sometimes
used to determine total site population. But in a
place like Baghestan, the number of living rooms very
likely would be overestimated while the number
of storerooms or animal houses would be underestimated. Double counting living rooms would result in demographic estimates that are too high.
Events in Baghestan cannot be taken too literally
as a field guide to archaeology. There are too many
ways of doing things to apply any one ethnographic
model uncritically. In some societies which are
otherwise similar to this small Iranian village, for
example, the life of a structure ends abruptly with the
death of a household member, and the dwelling is
pulled down or abandoned forever. We need to know
more about when and where such variations in
behavior are likely to occur, and what they mean in
terms of more important questions about society
in general. The more archaeologists understand the
material aspect of contemporary societies and the
way it reflects human behavior, the better they will
understand the past.

(Above and below, right) Alterations in mudbrick and
packed mud construction are relatively simple. The initial
vaulting of rooms in Baghestan is installed by a specialist but the other work of building and all repairs can be
done by the owners themselves . (Center, left) The straw,
dirt and dung deposits that build up on stable floors
is dug out every year and taken to the fields for fertilizer.
(Center, right) The straw left after grain is threshed
and winnowed is mixed with mud and shaped in wooden
molds to make bricks which are then set out in the sun
to dry . (Below,left) A woman of Baghestan searches for
eggs in the courtyard chicken coops.

Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - July/August 1983