Hearths, huts, and hospitality: a dive into deep history

The importance and chronology of hominin hearths has been much discussed, particularly by Wil Roebroeks. Similar attention has been paid to the appearance of artificial structures, especially circular huts. Less consideration has been paid to the significance of the earliest hearths inside huts. In Europe, fire has been controlled in hearths since the Late Middle Pleistocene. The oldest circular huts come much later, less than 35,000 years ago, while the evidence for hearths in these structures begins before the Last Glacial Maximum, increasing during the Lateglacial. In this contribution I present an explanation for why hearths in huts, the first recognizable domestic dwellings, are such a late feature in deep history. I propose that placing these containers inside one another indicates changes in the practice of hospitality; a universal law which underpins social and cultural life. To explore this proposition the spatial and social order of circular huts is examined with ethnoarchaeological studies from Siberia and North America. These reveal the segmentation of small circular spaces by gender, age, status, and the formalities of hospitality. This segmentation refers also to a cosmology that explains the natural order through circular dwellings in open environments. The paper concludes by considering more broadly the implications of the Lateglacial evidence for changes in human social life, when offering hospitality to strangers became a defining social act.