Family
Living with animals
For many people, the life of the household included animals. Of course, today many families have pets but very few of us live or work in conditions where we are surrounded by animals. For much of later prehistory it seems likely that animals and humans lived in the same buildings – at least for some of the year. This way of organising space continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Highland Scotland. This photograph shows a Hebridean Blackhouse – a characteristic house type of this period- in front of the broch at Dun Carloway. Animals lived in the downslope end of the house, and sometimes entered by the same door as the people. Click here for a pop-up of a reconstruction of Dun Carloway itself, showing animals and people living together, again entering by the same door.
