The Idea of the House: House layout and social change in the Middle to Late Helladic Peloponnese

It has long been held that at the transition between the Middle and Late Helladic, considerable social, political, economic and cultural changes occurred within mainland Greek societies (Dickinson 1977; Voutsaki – Wiersma 2017), changes ultimately leading to the formation of early Mycenaean polities and later palatial states (Voutsaki 2010, 99). Houses are increasingly being considered a fruitful domain of enquiry in order to explore such changes, as they can directly express the values, images, perceptions and ways of life of a human group (Rapoport 1969, 12; Wiersma 2017, 91). The present paper investigates whether social change happening in the Peloponnese at the transition between MH and LH affected the formal and functional solutions adopted in the domestic architecture. To that end, we will analyse a sample of 149 domestic buildings, seeking to identify main trends visible through time and whether these are geographically inflected and/or connected to the unfolding of the trajectory of the Mycenaean palaces.