Research article published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology Cite as: Morgan, C. & Eddisford, D. (2015) Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2.1 169-193. Authors: Colleen Morgan, PhD colleen.morgan@york.ac.uk ORCID: 0000-0001-6907-5535 Marie Curie Research Postdoctoral Fellow The University of York Daniel Eddisford, MA d.m.eddisford@durham.ac.uk ORCID: 0000-0003-3618-8722 PhD Student Durham University Title: Dig Houses, Dwelling, and Knowledge Production in Archaeology Keywords: dig house, expedition house, history of archaeology, contemporary archaeology, Çatalhöyük, dwelling, knowledge production Abstract Dig houses are where archaeologists dwell during excavations. These accommodations vary as broadly as their accompanying archaeological sites and are integral to the experience of archaeological investigation. Even as interest in embodied approaches to archaeology become popular, dig houses remain invisible in academic literature. In this article we examine the impact of the lived environment on archaeological research. To provide context to this study, we briefly discuss the history of dig houses in archaeological practice, then describe modern accommodations used during excavations. Building on this background, we then review phenomenological and architectural approaches to understanding the impact of the built environment on academic research. This understanding will then be used for a specific case study—the life-history of a small building called the “Chicken Shed” at Çatalhöyük. Finally, we discuss the conclusions of our research: how dig houses impact the construction of the past and how to situate them as places to think, collaborate, and critique archaeological practice.

Introduction The dig house is a storied, if unexamined structure in the history and practice of archaeology. For archaeologists who work away from their place of residence, communal living is a key aspect of life “in the field.” Oral histories of fieldwork are an important aspect of the professionalisation of archaeologists (Holtorf 2006) and are part of the intellectual lineages that are passed through generations of teachers and students. The morphology of the dig house is as varied as the landscapes investigated by archaeologists; in addition to the relatively rare instance of the purpose-built dig house the authors have lived in camping tents, Bedouin tents, trailers, hotel rooms, gated mansions, holiday homes, and with members of the local community in apartments; this represents only a small sample of the extreme variation in accommodation while in the field. When informally surveyed, other archaeologists mentioned living in dungeons, monk's quarters, adobe hovels, leper colonies, and elementary school gyms while on field projects. Though varied, dwellings where archaeologists live while they are working reflect the conditions surrounding the excavation—whether the project is long-term or only seasonal, the funding available, the relative comfort afforded to the archaeologists by the director of the project as well as local factors regarding building materials. While space and place in prehistory has been a major theme in archaeological research (including Ashmore 2002; Tilley 1994; Thomas 1993; 1996), the attending considerations regarding the impact of the built environment on archaeological research and labour have been negligible. In this article we examine the impact of the lived environment on archaeological research through dig houses. To provide context to our study, we briefly examine the history of dig houses in archaeological practice, then describe modern accommodations used during excavations. Building on this history, we then cite phenomenological and architectural approaches to understanding the impact of the modern built environment on research. This understanding will then be used for a specific case study—the life-history of a small building called the “Chicken Shed” at Çatalhöyük. Finally, we discuss the conclusions of our research: how dig houses impact archaeological thinking and how to situate them as places to think, collaborate, and change our interpretations of the past. Our approach cannot hope to encompass the entirety of archaeological experience; yet Alison Wylie's discussion of Bruce Trigger's approach to archaeological practice is particularly instructive, that archaeology, “must be understood to reflect the dominant interests and assumptions of the social context in which it has taken shape and is currently conducted” (2006, 27) and follow her subsequent recommendation that critical science studies are necessary to understanding knowledge production in archaeology (2006, 34). The (incomplete) history of the archaeological dig house The stories that accumulate around dig houses are lively, colourful, and diverse; this dynamism recalls Douglass Bailey's assertion that houses should be considered a living entity, that “the house is an active participant in society just as a human” (1990, 28). Histories of archaeological practice emphasise the political and methodological context of the profession, (Trigger 2006; Hamilakis 2007; Silberman 1982, Abu El-Haj 2001; Lucas 2001; McGuire 2008, among many others) but rarely discuss specific conditions at archaeological excavations (though Schofield 2011 is a wonderful exception). The personal narratives available from early archaeological research emphasise the hardships and vagaries of working “in the field.” Early colonial expeditions focussed on collecting objects and were organised and operated as military campaigns. As such, early dig houses were often called “expedition houses.” When archaeological practice became codified in places such as Palestine and Egypt, purpose-built dig houses demonstrated a permanent investment in establishing a presence by an overseas team. There are many examples of both purpose-built architecture and pre-existing architecture modified to house archaeologists; a full catalogue of these dwellings would be to recount the entire colonial history of archaeology. These dig houses were part of a larger colonial apparatus wherein collecting archaeological and anthropological data that were implicated in shaping the governors and the governed (Bennett et al. 2014). Further investigation of this articulation would be productive for future research. To illustrate early examples of dwelling and field conditions, we discuss a few dig houses, with an emphasis on English-speaking expeditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the early years of his research in Egypt, Flinders Petrie famously lived in a Pharaonic tomb during the winters spanning 1880-1882. Previously occupied by Waynman Dixon, three small tombs had been combined to create a relatively spacious dwelling. Petrie furnished this rather severe cell with a homemade wooden bedstead, which could be upended and turned into a tolerable easy chair (Drower 1995, 38). Petrie described his first night in the tomb in his journal: "Did not get any sleep till 11 or 12, and then broken by (1st) trap down, big rat, killed and reset. (2nd) mouse about trap for long, thought bait must be eaten, got up to see; (3rd) Fleas. (4th) mouse let trap down without going in; got up, reset it; (5th) mouse got in, got up, killed him, reset trap; (6th) Fleas; (7th) Dog set up protracted conversational barking (just by my door) with sundry neighbours in adjacent villages; went out and pelted him off. (8th) woke in heavy perspiration, had to change night shirt, & take off sheet. If this is not the way to get over a fever-cold I cannot help it” (Drower 1995, 39). Insert Figure 1 here: Flinders Petrie in front of tomb dwelling in Giza (Stevenson, A 2012). Later, Petrie's excavation accommodations were infamously rudimentary; he was parsimonious, partly as a result of never having enough funding for the large-scale excavations that he desired (Sparks 2013). While at Tell Nabesha, Petrie and his wife stayed in a ramshackle house that was infested with termites; rats ran across the ceiling and cats stole their food (Drower 1995, 95). In the 1920s in Mesopotamia, a similar thrift-mindedness pervaded the early excavations by Max Mallowan and Leonard Woolley. At Ur, a sparsely furnished purpose-built dig house was constructed by incorporating burned mud bricks from the excavations. "The youngest brick was twenty-five centuries old, but of such quality that after we had finished the dig at Ur the house was picked up piecemeal and moved bodily to Eridu, twelve miles away" (Mallowan 1977, 33). There was electricity provided by a generator, but “the house had few other amenities and its roof leaked during heavy winter rains” (ibid). Each year the team returned to find the house largely buried under sand, and first task of each season was to remove the dunes that had built up against the house. As Mallowan writes, "Our expedition house consisted at the time of one main living-room, in which we dined and relaxed, seven bedrooms and a bathroom...The bedrooms were small cubicles; the roof was of mud, the walls were mud-plastered and the living-room was apricot, the only colour available. The floor was of burnt bricks, some of them inscribed, and was partly covered with rush matting. Doors and windows were of the simplest deal. The effect was pleasing and austere, and I recall that until Katherine arrived there was not a single easy chair in the place...We were soon to learn that the mud roof overhead was far from waterproof” (Mallowan 1977, 33-34). The accommodation on the excavation was unapologetically basic, though it was added to and rebuilt to create more room for Katharine Woolley and Agatha Christie's participation in the excavation. Still, Woolley seemed to share Petrie's attitude toward hard work while in the field: "We rarely went to bed before midnight; Woolley himself sat up in his little office till two or three o'clock in the morning and we were expect to be on the dig not later than half an hour after sunrise. Once I ventured on a game of cards with the epigraphist and was told that if I did not possess the energy to work I would do better to go to bed" (Mallowan 1977, 36). While the early British missions to the Middle East may have often lacked funds and welcomed hardship, the American teams in the region did not share these difficulties. European institutions had a tendency to “grudge every penny beyond the absolute minimum necessary to keep their expeditions in the field” and promote a tradition “of personal austerity and discomfort” (Lloyd 1980, 190). While excavating at Nippur in the 1890s, the Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania built a “mud-brick structure that was a combined

castle, storehouse, and dwelling” that had wells piped into the courtyard in case the expedition was besieged, as it had been in previous years (Fagan 2007, 238-241). The better-equipped and well-funded American institutions established research centres that “need no longer be envisaged as groups of intrepid explorers braving the perils and hardships of a savage country in the cause of science” (Lloyd 1980, 190). Dig houses were established as a measure of the power and presence of the representative nation and their research interests as well as their collaborations with local governments. American Egyptologist, and founder of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, James Henry Breasted believed that staff comfort was an imperative given the “rigorous conditions of field work” (Abt 2011, 361). Long-term excavations by the the Oriental Institute such as those in the 1930s at Persepolis undertaken by Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt merited the transformation of an ancient palace with a “modern roof” into a dig house. Concurrent with the work at Persepolis, the headquarters of the Tell Asmar excavation, led by Henri Frankfort, were denounced as a “palace” and a “scandal among expedition houses.” though it was undeniable “that members of the institute's expeditions were generally healthier than those at other excavations” (ibid). The accusations of luxury were not entirely unfounded: “One whole wing was given over to common rooms, a living room and a dining room. Our routine when we came back dusty and tired after the day's work on the dig was to get into a hot bath to relax, have a drink, change into fresh clothes and join the others for cocktails in the living room. This was a large attractive room with a fireplace, easy chairs, a good gramophone and a small side table that served as a cocktail bar...For festive occasions like Christmas and New Year's we would dress for dinner in tuxedo and black tie. At the dinner table our servants would stand behind our chairs, removing empty plates and bringing new ones” (Jacobsen 1992, 7). Perhaps the excavation team felt that they deserved this quality of life; before the Tell Asmar dig house had been built, they lived confined to an “adapted native house during a twelve days' spell of rain” during which they “had found ample opportunity to meditate on the conditions to which an ideal expedition house should conform” (Frankfort et al. 1967, 7). The dig houses established by the Oriental Institute enjoyed better funding but also clearly had a very different approach to life in the field, with a greater emphasis on personal comfort and well-being in contrast to austerity and hardship. Insert Figure 2 here: The Oriental Institute's dig house at Tell Asmar. Beyond providing shelter and varied degrees of comfort, excavation accommodations mediated the excavation team's interaction with place. Several dig houses fomented a perceived connection with the lifeways of local people, and by an unstated and unexamined ethnographic extension, past inhabitants of the site. The first excavations in the Arabian Gulf were undertaken by a Danish team in the 1950s, with Geoffrey Bibby leading excavations at Qal'at Bahrain. At the beginning of the excavation the team enjoyed the ease of living in borrowed houses in Manama. Later they gave this up to live in palm fond houses on the site itself. The team quickly abandoned many of their previous cultural norms, feeling more closely connected with the local way of life, as well as with those that had lived on the site in the past. The contrast between living in a modern house in town and life on site was described in this narrative from Geoffrey Bibby: “The camp made a great difference to our way of life. Formerly we had driven out to the sites each morning, and driven back in the evening to a house in a town, to electric light and refrigerators, to rooms with wooden floors and plastered walls and ceilings, with glass in the windows and with carpets and soft furnishings...Now we were living square on top of our major site. Our floors were of earth covered with palm-leaf mats, our walls and our ceilings were of palm leaves. We became perpetually conscious of the weather. We slept in our tiny two by four metre cubicles with the constant movement of air around our faces, for the flimsy walls allowed free passage for every breeze. We awakened to the pattern of sunlight filtered through the walls and roof. We washed in cool water carried in enamel bowls from the big round tank across the yard and most of us abandoned shaving" (Bibby 1969, 97-98).

Similarly, in the descriptions of life on the early archaeological expeditions to the Aegean there is less emphasis on hardship and danger in a foreign land and instead an appreciation of the beauty of the place and a connection to it through shared values, religion and the perception of a common Classical past. While investigating Crete in the 1900s, Harriet Boyd Hawes established several excavation headquarters in a variety of dwellings. Hawes initially rented a “small irregularly shaped house” while excavating Kavousi in Crete where: “Three or four small stone sheds used as storerooms, stables and kitchen were built around the yard; a flight of stone steps led up to the flat roof of a shed next to the kitchen and from this roof we entered our dwelling-room, which was provided with a wooden floor, one of the two in the village. In the early morning and evening, chairs and table were placed on our terrace roof and as we ate we enjoyed a view never to be forgotten” (American Exploration Society 1965, 100). Later at Avgo, Hawes stayed in “small one-roomed stone huts without windows” that she remodelled; Hawes knocked out a door and windows, whitewashed the walls, made a roof of vines and branches over the doorway, strewed the floor with sea pebbles, and had a priest sanctify a piece of ground where they could put any Christian bones disturbed by their digging (Allsebrook 1992, 101). Finally, at Gournia, her quarters were “even more confined and box-like than a modern New York apartment!” until a new house was built that was “almost up to the standard set by the houses she was unearthing” (Allsebrook 1992, 112). Hawes described the Gournian architecture with considerable admiration, noting that the houses were superior to any contemporaneous Bronze Age structures on mainland Greece, and comparable to the modern structures that she had occupied during her years of wartime service and survey (American Exploration Society 1908, 21). Perhaps the best known and most evocative expression of the archaeological dig house as a connection to the investigation of the past is found at Villa Ariadne, built by Arthur Evans next to Knossos in 1907. Evans' recreation of his “idealised world, full of peaceful, flower-loving, elegant, athletic Minoans” (Hamilakis 2002) was immortalised in the concrete “reconstructions” at Knossos (Hitchcock and Koudounaris 2002), but is more apparent in the comfortable splendour of his dig house. Both the reconstructions at Knossos and the Villa Ariadne were designed by Evans, and architect Christian Doll worked on both structures concurrently (Brown 1994, 30). In a letter written to his wife, Robert Carr Bosanquet describes the Villa Ariadne: “a stately flat-roofed villa, irregular in plan, with one storey sunk for coolness, looking out over olive-trees, on the palace and the wide valley...wide corridors, cement floors and plain cement walls, bright brass handles on doors and windows and an English air of solidity about all woodwork and masonry” (Macgillivray 2001, 238). The Villa was made of concrete faced with limestone and British steel was imported to build the structure (ibid). Evans held “countless dinner parties” (Brown 1994, 30), in a “grand bungalow from British India...built to industrial standards with factory-type ribbed vaulting” to help withstand earthquakes and “adorned with relief double axes on the drain heads” (Cadogan 2000, 22). The dig house as a melange of British social norms with an imagined Minoan civilisation is an explicit comment on Evans' understanding of the past. These evocative examples of dig houses show the spectrum of housing from Petrie's spare tomb to Evans and his epitome of “scholarly domestic repose” (Powell 1973, 159). Communal living and sleeping arrangements were unusual enough to the archaeologists that they often remarked upon them in their recollections of the excavations. In all of the accounts, archaeological research is embedded in the architecture and living conditions; bricks from Ur were used to build the dig house at Eridu, artefacts are repurposed as furnishings and decorations, signalling the purpose of the dwelling. Regular activities such as eating and writing are allowed; leisurely pursuits such as card games and listening to the phonograph (Mallowan 1977, 36) were often not encouraged. The dig house was a temporary dwelling away from “home”, one where research was valorised. Attempts were made to create comfort, but this was primarily confined to dig houses where women dwelled with the team. While these are generalisations, the early definition of an archaeological dig house was as a place where research came first, that was a seasonal dwelling, and where archaeologists and artefacts coexisted

organically. Dwelling at a dig house meant inhabiting a liminal space; a dig house was not entirely foreign, but not entirely domestic, not strictly a home, but also not entirely a research facility. Modern dig houses The purpose-built dig house is relatively rare in archaeological fieldwork. Lack of funding, changing research questions and the increase in short-term projects due to local instability or other factors have increased reliance on temporary structures such as tents and on local, non-purpose built housing. Some projects, for example the Dhiban Excavation and Heritage Project, have used living with local residents as a form of outreach and community building. The decrease in archaeological dig houses may also be influenced by postcolonial approaches within the field. Re-purposed buildings create their own structural issues; the majority of professional archaeologists in the United Kingdom and the United States who are working away from their home in their own countries are staying in either short-term rentals or hotel rooms. Hotel rooms represent perhaps the antithesis of the antiquarian dig house, as there is no communal space, no area to process artefacts, and archaeologists are separated at the end of the day. The varied housing and the influence of the modern dig house has yet to be quantified in archaeological practice; a brief, informal survey on social media revealed an astonishing array of buildings that archaeologists have used during projects. A majority of the examples cited were marginal, institutional buildings (for one example see the discussion of an abandoned clinic in the basement of one dig house in Holtorf 2006), but this may be a bias toward the portrayal of archaeological field work as an engaging narrative and a display of one-upmanship, rather than the dull normalcy that many encounter as field archaeologists. The qualities that are considered during the initial set-up phase of the project favours buildings that are inexpensive, have room for accommodation, a communal kitchen, and space for equipment and artefacts. Considerations beyond these basic necessities may be an unimaginable luxury for archaeological projects and the privilege of purpose-built dig houses may be relegated to archaeology's colonial past. Still, we note that while there has been an intensive focus on the relationship between the built environment and people in the past, there has been no attention to the attending relationship between the built environment used by the people investigating the past. Examining this relationship can lead to simple, inexpensive modifications and a more considered approach to lodgings in the field that may enhance our understanding of the past, and change the way that we construct archaeological narratives. Spatial Organization and Social Behaviour Following Edward T. Hall (1966) and Anthony Giddens (1984), archaeologists have recognized that “space is not passive; it is socially constituted and constituting, materialized in architecture and also, if less tangibly, in customs of social interaction” (Ashmore 1176, 2002). Bourdieu's (1977) discussion of the Kabyle (Berber) house, while later critiqued as nostalgic and idealized (Silverstein 2004), links functional and symbolic interpretations of material culture as well as emphasizing their role in enculturation. Along with Giddens' structuration, this approach to practice and material culture has attracted considerable attention from archaeologists (e.g. Hodder 1982). As an example, Hodder and Cessford (2004) describe an embodied engagement with place through daily routines, eating, sitting, sleeping, and moving in domestic space that serve as the mechanisms by which people are socialized into particular rules and orientations at Çatalhöyük. Citing Bourdieu’s practice theories, they refer to placemaking as a process of routinisation, but also as a relationship with the past through memory. In his discussion of a Mesolithic excavation in the Vale of Pickering, Thomas Yarrow (2006) notes the social divisions demarcated by space at the end-of-dig dinner table in contrast to the flattening of social roles amongst volunteers camping at the archaeological site (see also Holtorf 2006). These approaches to understanding the engagement with place can also be productively applied to the study of dig houses. In her investigation of the taskscapes at Çatalhöyük, Ruth Tringham (2012) recognizes excavations as places of cultural production where archaeology is reproduced through sensory experience. She describes the growth of

the dig house or “compound” at Çatalhöyük from 1996 to 2002, noting how the areas of activity moved and changed throughout the years. Yet her description of the changing shape of the dig house is non-agentive; the structure seems to change organically in response to the needs of the excavation without any apparent dissonance. Even as we investigate the remains of past structures, “we experience architecture primarily in states of distraction” and “our contemplative gaze falls upon 'architecture' within a spatial world we have already silently imbibed and embodied” (Dovey 2005, 283). While noting that the structure of the dig house is important to shaping the lived experience of an excavator at Çatalhöyük, Tringham's account does not address intentionality and structure of the purpose-built dig house with the use and modification of it by the site participants to live and work in. A dig house is a place to live, to think, and to work, a place where we perform as archaeologists with other archaeologists. When considering a place as a structure formed to undertake scholarly pursuits, a place to think in, we can miss that dig houses are also places to think with. In his examination of gothic architecture and scholasticism, Panofsky (1972) argued that the design of gothic cathedrals was the physical embodiment of characteristics of contemporary theological thought. Heidegger called a small ski hut “on the steep slope of a wide mountain valley in the southern Black Forest” his “work-world.” Staying in the hut connected Heidegger's philosophy to the wider landscape, and to his “peasant” neighbours. His Building Dwelling Thinking made the connection between buildings and intellectual pursuit as mutually constituting dwelling, a term used by Heidegger to encompass a larger interaction with the landscape and the elements, as “the basic character of Being” (2001, 158; see also Ingold 2000). Yet the communal element in dig houses, wherein archaeologists come together with others that they may or may not know, into a structure that they did not build, to work under rules formed by a higher authority, belies Heideggerian dwelling to form something that suggests Goffman's total institution (1958). A total institution is described as a place where there is a breakdown of barriers separating work, sleep, and play; “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Goffman 1961, 11). Dig houses are certainly not as rigidly ordered as asylums, Goffman's subject of inquiry, yet there are points of recognition in his analysis that are productive to our study. During an individual's time in a total institution connections to the outside world are weakened, and the self is reorganized along alternate lines. This is particularly true in terms of surveillance, authority and lack of privacy that characterise life in a dig house. Panofsky and Heidegger examined buildings in terms of individual experiences of place and Goffman discusses collective living in institutional settings wherein power differentials exist. Understanding the dig house requires an understanding of what an environment contributes to the construction of archaeological knowledge. What does it mean to live together in a place while performing archaeological research? Following this question, can we build a place that we can more effectively use to think together? While an overview of archaeological dig houses in history have showed potential connections between these concepts, through an in-depth analysis of the “Chicken Shed” at Çatalhöyük we can unpack the dig house as a meaningful “structuring structure” in the history and practice of archaeology. “The Chicken Shed” at Çatalhöyük. Having recognized the potential for the investigation of Neolithic remains at Çatalhöyük, James Mellaart began excavating at the site in 1961, and continued to make important discoveries on the site until 1965. The site subsequently captured the imagination of Ian Hodder, who re-started excavations in 1993. Today excavations continue at Çatalhöyük, with a program of research scheduled to continue until 2018. During James Mellaart's excavation the team lived in the nearby town of Çumra (Shankland 1996). Under the direction of Ian Hodder, the excavation team also initially lived in hotels in Çumra. Between 1996 and 2003, a large dig house was constructed at the foot of the tell that incorporates accommodation, laboratories and office space, as well as a visitor centre.

Insert Figure 3 here: Plan of the project buildings at Çatalhöyük. The Çatalhöyük dig house is arranged around a central courtyard and provides comfortable, if often crowded, accommodation and work areas. The dig house complex was designed by a Turkish architectural firm, with consultation from Hodder, and consists of architect-designed spaces with predefined functions. The site guards and dig house staff maintain flowers and shrubs that surround the courtyard, but most of the excavation team are not involved with the layout or decoration of the dig house. The rooms where the archaeologists sleep are lined with bunk beds, and any minimal personalisation or decoration is packed away when the excavation season ends. The walls of the dining hall have a collection of personal photos displayed on the walls, but in recent years the use of digital photography has resulted in these not being updated or maintained. The main work space has local rugs hanging on the walls, but most of the space is dominated by more institutional notices such as instructions for operating the database, borrowing from the site library, and the use of other communal resources. Outside of wear and tear, the official buildings of the dig house compound remain largely unmodified by their hundreds of occupants each season. In stark contrast, a poorly-constructed building known as the Chicken Shed was constantly modified and re-purposed and became the focus of personal expression and comfort at Çatalhöyük. Unlike the architect-designed buildings of the main dig house, the Chicken Shed was an expedient building; it had fulfilled its pre-defined function as temporary accommodations for construction workers, it belonged to no specific part of the project, and could be adapted and manipulated freely. Insert Figure 4 here: The dig house at Çatalhöyük. The Chicken Shed was a marginal, vernacular structure that appears only once in formal project publications (Tringham 2012). No permissions were granted for its construction, and it was never part of the official project buildings. Documentary sources relating to the Chicken Shed are almost entirely absent; the history of the Chicken Shed is based for the most part on the oral accounts by the excavation staff and the site guards, Mustafa Tokyagsun, Ibrahim Eken, Hassan Tokyagsun, and former guard Sadrettin Dural (2006). The site archive and personal photos contain a number of images of the structure, in which it is usually an incidental backdrop to other activities. Even the origin of the building's name is unclear as the Chicken Shed was never used to keep chickens—it is supposed that the name is a reflection of the poorly constructed nature of the building. Yet this largely invisible building played an incredibly active part in the excavation’s history. Insert Figure 5 here: The Chicken Shed at Çatalhöyük. In 2011 the Chicken Shed was finally scheduled to be demolished to allow the construction of a purpose-built store room and recreation area. To preserve a record of the building the authors conducted a standing buildings survey of the Chicken Shed, conforming to the standards set by English Heritage (2006). The authors conducted this work after their regular excavation work had ceased for the day. A detailed report on the structure, surrounding activity areas and paths, and detailed architectural notes was presented in that year's excavation archive report (Eddisford and Morgan 2011); a brief summary of that report is included as follows. The Chicken Shed was a rectangular building measuring 3.70m by 14.00m and consisted of three rooms, all accessed through separate doors in the western wall. A wooden lean-to area at the northern end of the building was part of the original construction; a tarpaulin-covered area to the south was a more recent addition. The structure was built out of red tile bricks (tuĝla) bonded with grey cement, constructed directly on a thin concrete slab. Overall the construction was dominated by functional concerns and speed, at the expense of any aesthetic considerations. The exterior of the building was partially rendered at the northern and southern end of the western facade with coarse, white-painted cement. Insert Figure 6 here: Floor plan of Chicken Shed at Çatalhöyük.

The building was covered with a single, tiled, lean-to pitched roof, which sloped gently from west to east. None of the timber framing was jointed, but merely crudely nailed together. Two aluminium chimneys at the southern end of the building are all that remain of the original heating, and were presumably for wood burning stoves in these spaces. The low-quality softwood window frames of the Chicken Shed were apparently purpose-built on site and individually designed for each window. Square head wood framed doorways containing simple, vertically planked doors, were probably built on site to the individual dimensions of each doorframe. A metal sink was set into a concrete shelf in the northernmost room, suggesting it was originally a kitchen. Insert Figure 7 here: West facing elevation of Chicken Shed at Çatalhöyük. The Chicken Shed was built quickly and inexpensively in 1995 to provide accommodation for the construction workers building the project dig house compound. Before building the Chicken Shed the workmen constructed an ephemeral wooden shack that provided shade and an area for the workmen to cook. As construction on the project dig house continued, the workmen built themselves a larger temporary structure to live in, which became known as the Chicken Shed. In addition to providing living space to the construction crew during the autumn months the Chicken Shed was also used as a dormitory by the excavation staff during the 1996 and 1997 summer seasons. Once finished, the newly built dig house dormitories could accommodate all of the excavation participants and beds were moved from the Chicken Shed into the new building. However, as the project grew in numbers the sleeping accommodation quickly became insufficient. Additional sleeping space was created by creating a camping area directly to the west of the dig house, with many team members preferring the relative privacy of a tent to the crowded dormitories. Over time the camping area was improved by planting trees around the edge of the site to provide privacy and shade. Several project members continued to use the Chicken Shed as an unofficial living space, but long time project member Roddy Regan recalled it as “a hot place to be and not a pleasant place to live". The building was never again formally considered to be appropriate living quarters. In the intervening time the Chicken Shed became increasingly dirty and decrepit and was subsequently re-purposed as a project storage area. As the excavation continued, finds storage became an issue and the Chicken Shed was reused as a storage depot for artefacts during the summer excavation months and for excavation equipment over the winter. To discourage theft, bars were installed over the window of the northern room where artefacts were stored. Although the building was used for storage the yard between the Chicken Shed and the main dig house remained an open area and was used for parties that were focused around a bonfire in the centre of this space. As an element of these parties, excavators and specialists would sometimes paint the front of the Chicken Shed, using decorative elements from the Neolithic buildings being excavated on site or to provide a backdrop to theme parties. These formed a palimpsest of use which recall each event, while also arguably contributing to the shambolic appearance of the building. During an extended six month season in 1997, Charlie Newman planted a garden outside the Chicken Shed with paths and a gazebo. This garden pre-dated the larger, more functional kitchen garden to the north of the main living accommodation by many years, and incorporated elements of an English garden, reflecting the nationality of many of the team members. Between 1998 and 2009 the crowded dormitories and lack of personal space meant that at times part of the Chicken Shed might be unofficially reclaimed as a temporary bedroom or a quiet space to relax. In 2009 the first purpose-built finds store was finished, and the space in the Chicken Shed was no longer needed. The central room was cleaned out and re-painted by the excavation team at the beginning of the 2009 season, and was turned into a social area for the project staff. The project provided the paint and materials required to remodel the Chicken Shed, helped obtain furniture for the new recreation space, and organised for electricity to be wired into the building. Previously team members would socialize on the veranda outside the bedrooms and laboratories or on a roof terrace above the seminar room. With over a hundred team members living in the dig house at any one time this created a continuous noise problem for those who wanted to work late or go to bed

early. The Chicken Shed was located further away from the dormitories and was enclosed, with better sound insulation. To further help resolve this tension the dig house kitchen was remodelled during the winter of 2009. An external door was added, making access to the Chicken Shed easier, and encouraging people to use the Chicken Shed for recreation. After it was repurposed as public space, the Chicken Shed became the central feature of site recreation activities, and the interior was modified and embellished accordingly. At the close of the season in the summer of 2011, the Chicken Shed had decorations that made it appear to be alternately a prison, a cruise ship and a tiki bar. Among the decorations adorning the space were a necklace made out of beer caps, a cow skull, a dartboard, graffiti from departing team members along with more permanent fixtures—a table, storage racks, handmade cushions and a refrigerator. Insert Figure 8 here: The interior decoration of the Chicken Shed in 2011. The episodic reoccupation and re-appropriation of the Chicken Shed remains a defining element of this multipurpose building. Even after 2009, when the Chicken Shed became primarily an area to socialize, it was used in a number of other ways. The field archaeologists would congregate there to mull over recent finds, ponder site interpretations or discuss publication details. It was the venue for informal seminar discussions and was still occasionally used for more formal research tasks during work hours, including a brief transformation into an X-ray laboratory to examine teeth. The demolition of the Chicken Shed in 2011 occurred during a time of upheaval within the research team. Many of the academic specialists and excavators were replaced and a number of other team members, including the excavation director Shahina Farid, also left the project. The destruction of the Chicken Shed became emblematic for many of the former Çatalhöyük team members of the ending of an era during the long-running project. This resonates with Tringham's narrative interpretation (1994) of Neolithic house burning events as “killing” the structure. There are no visible surviving remains of the Chicken Shed; even the paths that led to the former entrances have been obscured by later weather and traffic. As the building was on a concrete slab, there may be archaeological traces of the Chicken Shed, but as the destruction was so thorough and the rebuilding of the subsequent storage shed immediate, recording these traces may be challenging. Insert Figure 9 here: The Chicken Shed being demolished in 2011 (Photo: Ibrahim Eken). Finally, as part of the virtual reconstruction of Çatalhöyük in Second Life performed by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, a number of the modern dig house structures including the Chicken Shed were recreated alongside the Neolithic occupation (Morgan 2009). Though the reconstruction was not fully realized—it was only partially replicated on the inside and the small scale of the building made it difficult for avatars to interact with—the presence of the Chicken Shed added to the mise-en-scène in the virtual world. Archaeologists who had worked at Çatalhöyük created avatars that would gather around the fire outside of the Chicken Shed and would “dance” together at the end of tours of the virtual site. Echoing the destruction of the Chicken Shed, the virtual reconstruction of Çatalhöyük in Second Life no longer exists, due to a large educational price increase and the lack of funding to keep a presence for the archaeological site in the virtual world (Morgan 2012). Insert Figure 10 here: Reconstruction of the Chicken shed in Second Life. Discussion Recording the Chicken Shed at Çatalhöyük allowed us to consider the history of the site and the reuse of buildings as well as reconsider the social space we live and work in while conducting research on the lifeways of people in the past. The Chicken Shed was a largely unseen element of the excavation architecture, which has

been around for most of the present phase of excavation on the site. During this time it had been used intensively, repeatedly, and in a variety of different ways for different purposes. The episodic reoccupation and re-appropriation of the Chicken Shed reflects its status as what Stewart Brand terms a “low road building”. “Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover” (Brand 1995, 24); they are easily customisable and their low status means they can be altered with great ease and without protest. Most of the modern buildings at Çatalhöyük are function-built and are off-limits for team members to modify. Additionally, many of the spaces segregate the team members by specialty, such as the ‘Human Bone Lab,’ ‘Finds,’ and ‘Conservation.’ While many of the team members are happy to socialise within their own speciality, others find that the casual conversation and collaboration in the shared and arguably more neutral space of the Chicken Shed is vital to providing broader perspectives to their work. This recalls Carolyn Hamilton’s ethnographic work on the “devices built into the Catalhoyuk project to facilitate interaction and reflexivity,” which she termed as including excavation diaries, video recording, the project database, and specialist tours of the excavation (2000, 120). She also noted a number of what she termed “faultlines” with each of these devices, with an emphasis on the tensions between lab specialists and excavators (124). The Chicken Shed, an informal gathering area for socializing and relaxing, was a major catalyst of interaction and reflexivity on site. When an archaeological project grows beyond the scope of causal socialization, having a ‘place of their own’ for team members adds to the comfort and creative potential on site. Recalling Goffman's Total Institution, he notes that each institution develops a unified ceremonial life. One aspect of this is the organisation of get-togethers or parties characterised by a release from the power structure of formalities and task-orientation to provide unity (1961, 83). The Chicken Shed provided a structure where the formalities imposed by the daily round of excavation-based field work can be released. Planting an English garden connected some of the archaeologists to home and provided an evening diversion, while decorating the Chicken Shed as a prison or a cruise ship winks at the institutional living of the dig house. While non-stop work in the field was valorised in the past by archaeologists such as Leonard Woolley and Flinders Petrie, and is still instituted by many academic archaeological projects, the post-processual emphasis on multivocality relies on the excavation participants actually being on speaking terms with each other. Allowing or creating space on excavations where participation and expression is de-centralised and low risk without being penalised encourages trust and collaboration. Finally, the modifiable nature of the Chicken Shed also recalls the Neolithic architecture on site. The people of Çatalhöyük were constantly cutting, rebuilding, remodelling and destroying the features and the architecture in their buildings - the field archaeologists encounter and record such instances every day on site. Thinking about the Chicken Shed and its place in the social realm of a research project has introduced new questions regarding this reused, adapted architecture. Are the Neolithic buildings static “history houses” (Hodder 2010) or ongoing projects, modified and re-purposed with mud, plaster and fresh coats of red paint? The Neolithic houses on the site are continually rebuilt over earlier houses, but it is possible that the sacred nature of these buildings is not a reflection of this monumentality, but is the result of their inhabitants’ ability to remodel and reinterpret their intimate and everyday environment. Yet regardless of the Chicken Shed's verisimilitude to Neolithic architecture, “low road” buildings are famously flexible and good to think with; they are empowering structures where ideas that are never voiced in formal meetings or seminars are discussed and dismissed, or grow. Conclusions Even as the construction of purpose-built dig houses fades into institutional memory, they are productive places for understanding the construction of archaeological knowledge. Previously treated as incidental to understanding the history of field archaeology, we have linked dig houses to shifting perceptions of the field and the relative comfort understood to be necessary for fieldwork. While there have been several histories of archaeology, there are few archaeologies of archaeology (for examples, see Bailey et al. 2009 & Lucas 2001) though ethnographies of archaeology can also illuminate other aspects of dwelling during archaeological field work.

As Hamilakis and Anagnostopoulos (2009) note, archaeological ethnography creates an interdisciplinary space that encourages critical reflexivity, a “sensuous scholarship” that emphasizes bodily presence, multi-temporality, and politically sensitive scholarship that shows archaeology as a shared experience, one that can help de-colonise practice. Edgeworth (2006) grounds archaeological ethnography as explicitly “being there,” in the field that helps us understand our own methods of knowledge production. Recording the Chicken Shed documented the intense form of intellectual dwelling that is characteristic of field work, while also showing evidence of resistance to formal structures and proscribed behaviour. The archaeology of the Chicken Shed reveals a different kind and place of work and participation that is invisible in documents about the excavation. It is, very specifically, an “archaeology of us” (Gould and Schiffer 1981). Armed with this knowledge, how can we better attend to dwelling while producing archaeological knowledge? While space is a premium at archaeological field sites, an informal area that can be re-purposed to fit temporary and changing projects in a low-supervision environment encourages creativity and collegiality among team members. In developer-funded archaeology in the United Kingdom, a site hut can be made into a more comfortable place to drink tea and exchange ideas. This comfort, though ostensibly disdained in the past, contributes to the physical health and wellbeing of archaeological site participants. Masculinist themes of hardship while in the field and struggle in a foreign country are part of a colonialist, orientalist tradition in archaeology and should be critically examined, especially as these themes form part of our oral tradition of professionalisation. As Holtorf notes, oral tradition in archaeology occurs in the field, wherein they learn the “unspoken rules, attitudes, and lore of their discipline,” including popular stories about the “hardship of archaeological fieldwork” (2006:83). An increased awareness of the places of knowledge production in archaeology, and an active consideration of how these places structure our participation in projects is necessary to fully realise emancipatory goals in archaeological practice. As archaeologists who interpret past people in part on the basis of their architecture, reflexivity regarding our own building and dwelling practices and how these position our profession within local communities is a necessary element of critical archaeology. Thinking about archaeological dwelling as an expression of community archaeology can bring up critical questions about colonialism, and more work on dig houses would benefit our understanding of archaeology as part of the colonial collection apparatus and current practices of governmentality within field work (Bennett et al. 2014). As many archaeological dig houses were built in countries where the project director is a foreign national, ideas about what constitutes acceptable living conditions can differ from local building traditions. Dig houses that are built to accommodate enterprises that exist beyond the life of the project could contribute to the community through ecotourism or other sustainable projects. Finally, dig houses created and modified through experimental archaeology could provide a radical transformation of our concepts of lifeways in the past. As places to live, to think, and to work in, dig houses need to be flexible, with room for research and sociality. We have found reflexive research on dig houses contributes to a better understanding of the history of archaeology, the context of archaeological knowledge production, and current labour conditions in the field. This initial survey of archaeological dig houses could be considerably expanded; as we previously stated, a complete study of dig houses would encompass a vast array of archaeological experience. Much more work could be performed on spatial analysis, particularly the organisation of space in dig houses, colonialism and anthropological collecting strategies, changes in dig houses over time, oral histories, and traditions on archaeological excavations. Ideally such work would contribute to a more emancipatory archaeology, one that restructures traditional site hierarchies, contributes to local communities, and attends to craft and reskilling in archaeology (sensu Shanks and McGuire 1996; McGuire 2008). Acknowledgements This article benefited from long discussions with Shahina Farid and Roddy Regan, and the helpful comments of John Schofield and Sara Perry on an unfinished draft of the paper. We also deeply appreciate the insightful,

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