The Pit House in the Old World and in Native North America

Abstract

The problem of the origin and distribution of semi-subterranean structures is an intriguing one. It is generally accepted that the semi-subterranean structure, earth lodge, or pit house, was one of a number of relatively unmodified traits of Old World origin found in North America. This paper reviews some of the literature on the pit house, and summarizes its development and distribution in the Eurasian and North American continents.Laymen, believing that early man habitually lived in caves, commonly use the stereotyped term “cave man” in referring to our early progenitors in the Old World. This assumption was an inevitable development since occupational sites in western Europe are predominantly caves or cave shelters. However, some European archaeologists have suggested such sites were seasonally occupied–that they were the winter habitations of man during the upper Paleolithic. There is reason to believe different types of shelters were used during warm seasons since engravings of tents or more substantial structures (tectiforms) have been found on the walls of caves and cave shelters. A number of European archaeologists including Breuil (1910), Clark (1939), Childe (1950), and others have accepted tectiforms as evidence of the existence of artificial structures in western Europe during the last glacial advance. Breuil has gone further and compared some of the tectiforms in the Font-de-Gaume, the Dordogne Valley of France, to the summer huts of Navahos described by Mendeleff in 1896.