Citation:
Abstract:
Between the 11th and 19th century, household archaeology in Iceland comprises rural, dispersed farmsteads notable for their boundedness and stability, suggesting productive and reproductive autonomy. Insights from ANT and entanglement theory help ‘disassemble’ this assumption by shifting our focus first to the agencies, flows and dependences that comprise a political economy without assuming the household’s relations of production a priori. Architecture, settlement patterns, landscape, and midden accumulations from the Langholt region in Skagafjörður, north Iceland along with historical data illustrate that households in Iceland are actually marked by social dissolution, alienation, and instability through dramatic political-economic dis-and-re-assembling which in turn produces the stability in the material manifestation of the household. These data caution against a simple relationship between the household and archaeological farmstead and suggest that measures of dependency and instability are critical to a comparative method for unraveling entanglements between capitalist and non-capitalist political economies.