Why am I finding the same thing in different materials deposited/consumed in the same contexts?
A real advantage of the House Poetics project is that it has allowed me to work across conventional categories and typologies. There are obviously practical reasons for why we divide archaeological finds into categories based on material and form, it is impossible to study everything all at once. As it is equally impossible for one person to have specialised knowledge of every type of artefact or ecofact that emerges from a field project. But there are a few problems from this system: a) our definitions of what -goes-with-what may not represent ancient categorisations (a lot of ink continues to be spilt about this; rightly so, I think); and b) this over-compartmentalisation of our material means that we are regularly missing connections that can only be grasped by looking across these categories.
This happened at the beginning of the project when looking at both pottery and stone vase assemblages, I encountered one example of a bird’s nest bowl made of clay. As this had been deposited in a mortuary context, it was perhaps easy to think of it as a one-off, a difficult to explain case of skeuomorphism as this shape is considered to be a predominantly lithic type, invented for and 
only encountered on stone. But to my surprise and delight, the more I looked the more examples kept cropping up, and not just of this rather specialised shape, but of other more mundane forms. Such interconnections are not easily explained by function (for example, a stone vase cooking pot is incredibly heavy, and more so when full), neither by trickster value (i.e. they are not meant to be substitutes of more ‘precious’ stuff) as they are consumed alongside each other. I continue to muse on these questions, but I am really warming to the idea that these have been created as sets. Especially since there’s also a range of small lids, of similar dimensions that could fit either stone, or ceramic vases of a range of shapes. This would make for such a colourful and versatile assemblage, created entirely at the interstices of what we consider different categories.
(a collaboration with Despina Catapoti, appearing in print during 2020 in the 
The most interesting finding of this comparison, was that while ownership of resources was distinct, i.e. each family had its own house, land and other moveable property, access to facilities like bread ovens [necessary for the daily subsistence of each family] was shared, and what’s even more striking, shared smoothly, without conflict. An informal ‘booking’ system was at place, where each family would ‘book’ baking time each week, but more common was the pooling together of resources into large-scale bake offs: so, each family would bring their own portion of grain and they would also get the equivalent in baked goods, but they would contribute fuel and labour co-operatively so that the bread required by each different family in several weeks would be made in one baking event. This kind of event did not have the indexical features of what we often like to call ‘feasting’ in the archaeological record (although the precise meaning and material correlates of feasting are continuously re-assessed in recent scholarship) as it was more mundane and regular, however, it involved fairly large numbers of people, as most of the ‘nuclear’ families involved would comprise at least between 5 and 8 members, who would all participate in various ways and would need to be fed during the process.
The other aspect that was of interest was the spatial arrangement of these ovens in distinct neighbourhoods around the village; I was able to map at least 5 surviving structures, whereas I also collected information about 5-6 others that were no longer in existence. This set of data requires a lot more analysis, but from a first look, it seems that oven structures were shared both within the broader kin group which did not always reside in close proximity, and amongst neighbours, who resided close to one another without sharing kin ties. The sharing of resources like the bread ovens was thus regulated both by functional necessity, i.e. needing to bake regularly, and convenience, i.e. needing a facility in relatively easy access. At the same time though, ‘patterns of sharing’ were evident, where families would have their ‘regular’ oven, whether access to that was provided through kin membership, or through neighbourhood residence; so family X would regularly bake in Oven A, even though they were not immediate blood relatives; while Family Y would only bake at their maternal bread Oven B, even though it was a long way from their actual house.
The warmth of affective ties emerging through this sharing was striking in all the oral testimonies collected. This kind of emotional connection is not easily detected ‘in the ground’, from the material residue we deal with archaeologically, but it can be grasped through the long-term engagement with such practices, and this, archaeology can ‘recover’ well.
mice (they’ve eaten all the plastic bags, which meant re-bagging finds, which led to unexpected discoveries !) have actually led me to find stuff that I could not locate with the usual methods of cross-referencing catalogues and box labels.