Pit house in the context of "Root cellar"

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⭐ Core Definition: Pit house

A pit-house (or pit house, pithouse) is a house built in the ground and used for shelter. Besides providing shelter from the most extreme of weather conditions, this type of earth shelter may also be used to store food (just like a pantry, a larder, or a root cellar) and for cultural activities like the telling of stories, dancing, singing and celebrations. General dictionaries also describe a pit-house as a dugout, and it has similarities to a half-dugout.

In archaeology, a pit-house is frequently called a sunken-featured building and occasionally (grub-) hut or grubhouse, after the German name Grubenhaus. They are found in numerous cultures around the world, including the people of the Southwestern United States, the ancestral Pueblo, the ancient Fremont and Mogollon cultures, the Cherokee, the Inuit, the people of the Plateau, and archaic residents of Wyoming (Smith 2003) in North America; Archaic residents of the Lake Titicaca Basin (Craig 2005) in South America; Anglo-Saxons in Europe; and the Jōmon people in Japan. Some Anglo-Saxon pit-houses may have not been dwellings, but served other purposes.

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Pit house in the context of Ancestral Puebloans

The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as Ancestral Pueblo peoples or the Basketmaker-Pueblo culture, were an ancient Native American culture of Pueblo peoples spanning the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture.

The Ancestral Puebloans lived in a range of structures that included small family pit houses, larger structures to house clans, grand pueblos, and cliff-sited dwellings for defense. They had a complex network linking hundreds of communities and population centers across the Colorado Plateau. They held a distinct knowledge of celestial sciences that found form in their architecture. The kiva, a congregational space that was used mostly for ceremonies, was an integral part of the community structure.

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Pit house in the context of Wari-Bateshwar ruins

The Wari-Bateshwar (Bengali: উয়ারী-বটেশ্বর, Bengali pronunciation: [u̯aɾi bɔʈeʃʃɔɾ]) ruins in Narsingdi, Dhaka Division, Bangladesh is one of the oldest urban archaeological sites in Bangladesh. Excavation in the site unearthed a fortified urban center, paved roads and suburban dwelling. The site was primarily occupied during the Iron Age, from 400 to 100 BCE, as evidenced by the abundance of punch-marked coins and Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) artifacts.

The site also reveals signs of pit dwelling, a feature typically found in Chalcolithic archaeological sites in the Indian sub-continent.

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