Under the Shadow of the Four-Room House: Biblical Archaeology Meets Household Archaeology in Israel

This paper surveys the history of household archaeology in Israel using three main case studies: the Israelites, the Philistines, and the Canaanites. Much attention has been given to the study of Israelite four-room houses and their contents, mainly to answer questions of ethnogenesis and establishing ethnic demarcators in the material culture. At the same time, Philistine houses have been studied for more or less the same reasons-the search for the Philistine ethnicity and origin, which is in many ways a mirror image of the search for Israelite ethnicity by archaeological means. The study of Canaanite households was, however, until recently, curiously neglected, with little or no interest in reconstructing Canaanite social structure, gender relations, and manifestations of ethnicity. Furthermore, you are aware that I have entered an empty house… (Taanach Letter 2; trans. A. Rainey in Rainey and Notley 2006: 76).