4 - Spatial Organization and Residential Architecture

Abstract

This chapter describes the residential architecture of Aliabad, the diagnostic attributes of functional areas, and a few relationships between architectural variation and economic and demographic characteristics of the resident population. It examines spatial distributions of kin and the village's architectural growth pattern. The chapter also describes a few salient features of Aliabad's structures and a few causes of differentiation of areas within houses and of variation among houses. Aliabad's architecture shares some of the general features seen in the vernacular architecture of other warm, arid habitats characterized by wide diurnal temperature variations. The chapter also highlights the salient features of Aliabad's nonarchitectural areas. These areas, in which a variety of important social and economic activities are carried out, comprise a substantial proportion of the village's total area. At least some of these are likely to be encountered in sampling the archeological residues of such a settlement and a provisional reconstruction of their chief functions might be possible. Like its structural features, the attributes, the locations, and the areal extent of nonarchitectural activity areas within contemporary Aliabad should have heuristic value not only for archeological reconstructions but also for the formulation of archeological sampling design in Southwest Asia and elsewhere.