“Foreword”

As the author of this pioneer study rightly observes, traditional urban houses have hitherto received very little attention, yet they provide shelter for the overwhelming majority of the urban population in Africa and Asia. Archaeologists, of course, give special attention in their excavations to the sites, layouts, and sizes of settlements, ground plans of their monumental buildings, and particularly to the forms and details of human dwellings in cities, towns and lesser population centres which provide the most abundant and revealing stores of evidence for many earlier civilizations. To archaeologists, such information as they can glean on and from the scale, layout, orientation, modes, and materials of construction, patterns and durations of occupancy and patterns of daily use in the homesteads of earlier populations, often provides the most decisive clues to interpretations of data drawn from other sectors of cultural activity such as tombs and monuments, temples, city walls, moats, palaces, town plans and irrigation works.