In March in the Georgia Piedmont, it seems we prepare ourselves for the “last” freeze two or three times. Plants in pots come and go from the greenhouse. Raised beds are covered on cold nights. All this activity has made me wonder how ancient people made it through the cold.
I would have bet on pit houses — shelters dug into the earth. The average temperature of the earth in the Piedmont is 40 to 50 degrees. If the temperature above our dugout shelter is 20 degrees, we can be warmer simply by going below — even before lighting a fire. Conversely, being below ground is cooler in the scorching summers.
Using the insulation of the earth for shelter makes so much sense I half convinced myself that the ancient people of the Piedmont must have built pit houses. They didn’t.
They did some shallow excavating but didn’t dig nearly as deep as I imagined.
The ancient peoples, known collectively as the Mississippian culture, built wattle-and-daub shelters. Here are the instructions:
• Dig a rectangular trench with rounded corners. (This was a chore with stone tools.)
• Cut saplings and place them upright in the trench at 8- to 12-inch intervals, filling in the trench as you go so the poles remain uprights.
• Bend the saplings at the top and tie them together with fiber cords. Since leather ties are relatively hard to come by, use them sparingly, only on difficult jobs.
• Cut smaller saplings — they’re called wands to distinguish them from the larger poles — and weave them in and out of the upright saplings. Hammer them down until they rest on on top of each other.
• Dig a small pit. Pour earth from the trench into the pit. Add water from the nearest creek and mix in dried grass or straw, which will bind to the clay in the soil. Trample the muddy mixture with your feet. Then pull out blobs of muck and daub them into the wattle walls.
This is a terrible oversimplification, but it might help you picture the process.
It seems to me that we humans are so weighed down by our technology we don’t picture how we would adapt to our environments without it. That seems like a kind of failure to me — a lack of imagination that limits our understanding of the natural world.
I’m interested in the field of experimental archeology, which encourages graduate students to build structures using reconstructions of ancient tools.
I have spent so much time wondering why the ancient peoples didn’t build pit houses here that I’m beginning to wonder if I could build one in the backyard.
• Note: For a sample of what a real experiment looks like, see Cameron Hawkins Lacquement’s How to Build a Mississippian House: A Study of Domestic Architecture in West-Central Alabama, submitted as a master’s thesis at the University of Alabama, 2004. It’s here:
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