Pit-house

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barn on a wooden cellar – Traces in the ground would appear as a "pit house", too

A pit house is a small house with double layered stone. it is dug into the ground and used by the inuit people as places to tell stories, dance, sing and celebrate. In archaeology, pit-houses are also termed sunken featured buildings and are found in numerous cultures around the world such as the Anasazi, cherokee and inuit in North America and Anglo saxons in Europe. Anglo Saxon pit houses may actually represented buildings for other functions than just dwellings and have a specialised name derived from german, Grubenhaus.

Usually, all that remains of the pit-house is a dug out hollow in the ground and any postholes used to support the roof. In the nineteenth century, it was formally considered that most prehistoric peoples lived in pit-houses although it has since been proved that many of the features thought of as houses were in fact food storage pits or served another purpose.