Question for July 2020

This is a fantastic question! It would depend if you were an elite person or not, however, I will answer this in terms of what it would be like for the average person. Although we can never know exactly how many people may have lived in a house that we might find at an archaeological site, the universal average for the ancient world was that one person required 5 square metres of space. Thus, if we want to estimate how many people lived in a house, we look at the footprint (by measuring the length and width of the remaining exterior walls) and estimate the total size of the space and divide by 5 square metres. Although many of us today live in large houses and may have entire rooms to ourselves, ancient people would have had much less privacy. However, we should remember that many activities (crafts such as making ceramics or stone tools) would have occurred in the patios outside of the house structure, and farmers and hunters would have been in the fields or the jungle for much of their day.

Artist’s impression of a Maya farmer’s family eating a meal outside their house