“Their Houses are Ancient and Ordinary”: Archaeology and Connecticut’s Eighteenth-Century Domestic Architecture

Abstract

The 18th-century houses that dot Connecticut’s landscape have come to be the very symbols of the state’s colonial past. Recent archaeological investigations at the buried remains of six period homesteads indicate that Connecticut’s domestic architecture was far more varied and dynamic than conventionally believed. Excavations revealed the continuation of ancient English house forms, including small one-room end-chimney and long and narrow cross-passage types. The excavations also provide new information on construction techniques, household material culture, food storage, and everyday lifeways of Connecticut’s middling sort, who formed the largest population sector, but about whom little is known from documentary sources. In short, a “house,” wherever it may be, is an enduring thing, and it bears perpetual witness to the slow pace of civilizations, of cultures bent on preserving, maintaining and repeating (Braudel 1992).