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Straw to Stone, Huts to Houses: Transitions in Building Practices and Society in Protohistoric Latium
Elizabeth Colantoni, University of Rochester

The earliest recognizable architectural remains at many sites in ancient Latium (e.g., Rome and Satricum) derive from small buildings identified as huts. These one-room structures built from perishable materials are generally thought to be the single-family dwellings of Latium’s early inhabitants. Over the course of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., a change occurred with the rise of orthogonal stone architecture and, in turn, houses with multiple rooms, again identified as single-family residences. The transition from small huts to monumental houses took place at a critical moment in the development of central Italian society from the point of view of trade and international contacts, technology, and social organization, and the change in building practices is usually attributed to developing technological knowledge—thought to have been acquired from interaction with Greeks and others from the eastern Mediterranean—accompanied by some form of increasing social complexity. In the present paper, I use modern ethnographic data to reconsider this critical point in Latium’s protohistory, with a focus on the causes of the conversion from huts to larger, more articulated houses and the social implications of this change. For instance, ethnographic data suggest that many of the early huts may be too small to be nuclear family homes; the structure of the society inhabiting these huts should therefore be reevaluated. Likewise, ethnographic studies indicate that the shift from huts to more imposing structures may have been caused not by a revolution in technological know-how but rather by strengthened political authority and increased wealth.

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