Stone Age shelter in Oxfordshire

[Palaeocory]

The Oxford Palaeotechnology Society and Wilderness Pioneers got together last year and made an experimental Stone Age shelter. Klint Janulis (member as well as host of 10,000BC) has written a series of blog posts about how the project came about, including some of the inspiration that came from the 10,000BC shelter from season 1. Here is the first; stay tuned for more, including pictures of our beautiful, cozy and now complete shelter in the lovely Oxfordshire countryside, how it was constructed, and how it is being used in our archaeological research:

https://stoneagestudent.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/give-me-shelter-part-1/

 

[Toddy]

Cory ? why did the shelter have a smoke hole in it's roof ?

All that does is create a chimney effect and if the fire is big enough it sets embers into the thatch.

Roundhouses don't have chimneys or holes in their roofs. The smoke fills the cone, comes down to about head height and slowly spills out of the 'eaves'.
The smoke suffocates sparks, fumigates (literally ) the roofing materials and keeps them always slowly drying and warm from the inside out. Snow and ice don't get a chance to build up, and they don't get a chance to cause damage. Rain is shed by the reeds/rushes anyway, but the slow heat from below dries them off too.

No through going draught means that the house has it's own micro climate within it. It never freezes, it's never roasting hot (fire size is limited, and deliberately so) but it's never perishing cold. Double hurdle walls, stuffed with materials like bracken, are still found in situ in wetland medieval sites in the UK. Not so much like modern cavity wall insulation, but more baffling insulation. The wind doesn't cut through the building.

Hide tepees and the like do need the smoke hole because the skin doesn't 'breath' the same way as the thatching. Their inner wall skirt does help with ventilation though.

Curious about the structure.

M

 

[boatman]

Valid points but there was a part solution by erecting a ring of shelters round a fireplace. Bit of privacy providing separate sleeping quarters if wanted. Cut down the wind a lot and as social as a roundhouse even if the technology hadn't advance so far as to build one. Or they could have reconstructed the Northumbrian house, again with no chimney. Picture is of a shelter built by David Freeman on the Isle of Portland on a Mesolithic site and could have formed part of an open ring of them. He is now at Butser Iron Age Farm, still constructing houses.

 

[Toddy]

That's a clear example Edwin
Excavating, we find lots of arcs of small post holes around hearths.
The 'posts' look as though they've been for timbers about the size of hazel hurdle sails, maybe a little larger, or smaller, but that kind of diameter.
They used to be interpreted as 'hunting shelters' and then folks realised that half bender shapes, like the image you show, can actually be very practical, warm, weather baffling and quickly created from materials nearby.

I've made them with children who'd never build anything like them before and within an hour half a dozen busily active under tens and two adults had three of them up and the thatching was well advanced and sound.
Modern folks much underestimate the creative abilities of children, especially children who grow up with their adults always nearby and themselves creating things from scratch.
If children can do it effectively, and they can, then adults most certainly are able.

I would love to spend several seasons at Butser

I was looking for links to Chris Lynn, who excavated at Deer Park farms in N.I. and did experimental work on roundhouses, and look what I found this young man trying to crowdfund
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1615566817/early-medieval-roundhouse

M

 

[boatman]

Butser is an experience like no other, dilemma for me when I have stayed there, the very few time that I have, is whether to sleep in one of the roundhouses or outside and enjoy the open air of the Downs. One thing that they are particular about is not to call any of these shelters huts. They are homes and houses no matter how simple. I wonder if the 10,000 BC participants got that these shelters were homes and were probably treated as such. Cleared out and cleared up to keep them sweet and homely.

 

[Palaeocory]

Hi Toddy, did you read the post? The shelter that the people who made the season 1 shelter (not made by Klint or any of us) made it with a smoke hole, which like you said acts as a conduit for the heat straight out the top. Klint highlighted that in the post as a problem, why it was a problem, and how they tried to correct it (correction; that will be the topic of the second post!). Our Oxfordshire Stone Age shelter does not have a hole in the roof, the smoke seeps through (currently smoking some hides). We've taken thermal readings with a controlled fire inside, and there's a 20 degree difference to the outside at head height. Check out what he wrote when the next posts is made, I'm sure you'd agree ours is a better system!

I've not had the pleasure of going to Butser yet... my husband went a few years ago for their flintknapping sleepover with the Lithics Studies society which sounded fun!

 

[Toddy]

Response to Boatman,
That's a really good point too. Homes need care, they need debris removed, fresh materials brought in, simply to keep them healthy let alone comfortable. On going repairs done in a timely fashion, not left until the roof caves in, etc.,

Looking round museum set ups of house interiors I cringe at the dust and dirt. The women who lived in those homes would be birling in their graves to think folks thought they lived in such squalor. Medieval halls were lined with careful plaited and sewn rush work and floored with fresh strewn materials. It can be quite lovely to walk and work in such an environment. Scents of the bedstraw, the yarrow, meadowsweet, and the bracken (unmistakable scent of the Crannog that one, even years later when I cut the bracken back that smell is so reminiscent) and the rushes, etc.,
Matts are quickly and simply woven from raw materials; they create not just mud free areas, but warm areas. They can be built up around an area too, as well as providing covering.
Tramps used to sleep under layers of newspaper, but grass mats work even better

Thing is though, almost all of those organics have long rotted away. Scattered and ploughed under into the fields, like the thatch roofs of the old cottages. Temperate climates leave very little really…unless the wetland sites, like the underwater excavations of the crannogs, reveal the plant material preserved in situ….all we really have as evidence are marks like those post hole arcs I mentioned.

Felicity Irons does some beautiful rush working
http://www.rushmatters.co.uk
http://www.rushmatters.co.uk/images/pdfs/Rush-Matters-Milieu-article.pdf

Response to Paleocory,
I did read the post; that's why I wondered about the wisdom of the hole in the roof. He mentions more about the door flap than he does about the roof.
We found that the smoke filled cone of the roof space really does work well on brain tanned skins. It also cold smokes meat very effectively, if you get the height right. Leaves it shiny black, looking like ebony. It seems to preserve the timbers too though, and it definitely kills insects.
It's only the past couple of generations that have thought of smoke as a totally bad idea, but then we have the advantage of knowing what it does to lungs and throats and access to good insecticides and disinfectants.
Smoke made a home clean of disease and bugs in the past. Loads of hearth herbs have a long provenance too. From the mugwort to the juniper, sweetgrass to fomes and the seasonal 'rites' of fires and smokes that cleansed animals and people too. Beltane fires for instance.


M

 

[boatman]

Ironically, one of the slurs that Welsh poets in the Middle and later ages made on the English was that they had smoky houses.

The idea of fires having scents is still around, I knew a firewood and timber merchant that would have orders for different woods such as apple and even make up a scent cocktail for clients.

 

[Palaeocory]

I like that! Did the Welsh have reduced smoke in their houses for some reason then? Were they on to chimneys sooner? Or just better quality wood?

The 10,000BC season 1 shelter that the other team made had a smoke hole I'm guessing because they probably based it off other stone age replica shelters they looked at. One at University College Dublin a few years ago was built with a similar teepee shape with the top open for smoke to escape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKYPLffs748

I asked them at a conference about the teepee shape and why they didn't built for example a dome shape, and they said it is because they modeled it off the earliest known Irish dwelling, where the post holes were set at an angle indicating the shape. Unfortunately that one broke under the weight of the sod used to cover the outside. The poles are very thick, it would take a lot of work chopping all those trees! The support poles for our shelter were hazel and much thinner, as we wanted a bit of bend so we could make the dome shape.

The other specifically stone age replication shelter I know of is at Howick, again a teepee structure with a hole in the roof: http://www.gefrin.com/howick/reconstruction.htm

Similar problems, it slumped under its weight and became dangerous. Neither project talks about the thermal issue of the smoke hole though. I'll post the next blog post here when it comes out...

 

[sandbender]

Interesting thread, thanks for the posts.

 

[Goatboy]

Not going back as far but if you look at architectural styles 'round the world all are dictated by material and prevelant weather conditions. Sometimes this early architecture gets carried on into later building. Look at some of the stone decorative work done on classical Greek buildings and you'll see throw-backs to earlier wooden styles mixed in with the realities of building in stone.
Also roof pitch seems to get decided on and later attempts like flat roofs in Scotland in the 1970's just don't work.
I think most will agree that roundhouse roof shape is open to a lot of speculation, though the no chimney version seems to work well.

Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.

 

[Joe tahkahikew]

I find it very embarrassing and it makes me a little angry that white folk think that tribal societies, especially hunting and nomadic ones, such as existing all over Canada lived in the kind of scruffy houses I've seen in books about the stone age.

Our people and others would have built proper structures made to house dad, mom, grandad and the grandchildren properly and not the sort of scruffy survival shelters built like this. Whether these were made from wood or hide or bark no matter.

That goes to the clothing too. Once when the Cree and many other groups who had access to good hide, made clothes properly not too different to now. The women who still use hide and make clothes up here make neat sewing, with clothing that fits properly to keep the bad weather out and look nice. They would not have worn loose hide and have other crude looking clothing.

I have been shown pictures of bodies dug from bogs in europe thousand years old maybe. These people all wore nice, neet effective clothing. Why would their homes be small crude shelters?

 

[Toddy]

Well said that man

M

 

[Palaeocory]

I find it very embarrassing and it makes me a little angry that white folk think that tribal societies, especially hunting and nomadic ones, such as existing all over Canada lived in the kind of scruffy houses I've seen in books about the stone age.

Our people and others would have built proper structures made to house dad, mom, grandad and the grandchildren properly and not the sort of scruffy survival shelters built like this. Whether these were made from wood or hide or bark no matter.

That goes to the clothing too. Once when the Cree and many other groups who had access to good hide, made clothes properly not too different to now. The women who still use hide and make clothes up here make neat sewing, with clothing that fits properly to keep the bad weather out and look nice. They would not have worn loose hide and have other crude looking clothing.

I have been shown pictures of bodies dug from bogs in europe thousand years old maybe. These people all wore nice, neet effective clothing. Why would their homes be small crude shelters?

I agree with your sentiment - and it's not just 'white folk' that are guilty. So many people are divorced from that lifeway and make incorrect judgements about its simplicity.

I think a lot of experimental shelters are built by people that aren't living in them, and are reconstructing what they have gathered from the archaeology without the knowledge being passed to them culturally. That's why the problems arose in season 1, where it was cold and drafty because it wasn't practical. They looked like what they wanted it to be for TV, but it wasn't a 'home'. Like when you see some replica tools that are completely impractical and fall apart because they were built for the look instead of the function.

However, there *were* crude shelters that by modern human hunter-gatherer standards were less technologically impressive (the 19,000 year old brush shelter at Ohalo II in Israel is a good example). Complex societies in the Americas are technologically sophisticated, and head and shoulders above hunter-gatherer bands that existed more than 50,000 years ago. Hominins didn't just move from being bipedal apes living on the savannah to building ethnographic examples we see today the world over - there was hundreds of thousands of years of technological innovation in between. And in there exist things we might describe as 'crude', same as we look at a beautiful arrowhead, and its ancestor a Clovis spearpoint, and then go back a million years and look at a chunky handaxe and call it 'crude'.

And our stone age shelter (photos will be in the next post) is beautiful, thank you very much...

 

[Robson Valley]

Is there a case to be made for transient summer camps (foraging/fishing/hunting) and secure winter villages in protected sites? Across western Canada, there are the remains of the winter villages which were communities of pit houses, some occupied for many thousands of years (eg Wanuskewin/Sask.). Summer camps were make-do affairs, some driven by the timing of trout or salmon runs.

 

[Toddy]

Define stone age though.

Neolithic is still 'stone age', and we have places like Balbridie which are timber framed rectangular long houses. While rare, the type is not unknown elsewhere too.

M

 

[Palaeocory]

Stone Age is just what we've been using since there's been some media attention... really we're all Palaeolithic archaeologists (and mostly Lower Palaeolithic archaeologists at that!) so what we mean by 'stone age' is really non-descript Palaeolithic. Or Upper Palaeolithic if you really want to pin us down - we used things in the immediate environment to construct the shelter, with a few non-local materials like Hampshire flint.

Robson Valley, Ohalo II could have totally been a summer camp - or a hunting camp used at certain times of the year... there were 6 of them, and they probably only took a few hours to construct, but there was a refuse pile, graves, lots of artefacts and signs of domestic activity. Really interesting stuff! But it's hard to tell how long in the year they lived there, or if they visited year after year (it's not impossible seeing how much stuff is there!). Here is the Wikipedia page if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo

Last night I was at a presentation about some 70,000 year old South African coastal sites, where people lived in the caves on the cliffs and we were all discussing different ways of finding out if they lived there seasonally, or just through winter (it looks as though the shellfish middens only had shellfish harvested in spring fall and winter) - but was that due to them not being there, or were they eating something else in the summer? Lots of questions...

 

[Tengu]

Its tricky...People differ.

Look at the descriptions of Black houses (a tribal society, Joe.) some say they are comfy, others that they are the best way to pick up lice.

A friend of mine is not well at all, and is also upset (and spending some of her little remaining energy in correcting this) at how social services have re arranged her house to make it more usable.

Having seen her house, -as soon as you get in her front door you are embroiled in a life or death battle with a china doll on one side and a teddy the other.

Her house is one big trip hazard (for a person whose every fall is likley to be her last...) and I rather suspect that social services should have been a bit more tactful...

...We must be thankful that prehistoric man, by and large, did not suffer from china dolls and other horrors.

 

[Toddy]

Upper paleolithic….so not much left in the UK then. Mostly scoured clean by the ice. Boxgrove, Paviland, Channel Islands….what did you base your building on ? No pollen record nearby either, no peat cores, no remaining ice cores, varves ? or were those flushed out too ?
The Windermere Interstadial is supposed to have been a treeless tundra environment.

Not a lot to go on really, I'd have thought.
M

 

[Palaeocory]

We didn't base it on a site, but used what was offered in the immediate environment to build a comfortable dwelling using pre-agricultural technologies.

There really aren't a lot of archaeologically recovered pre-agricultural European dwellings, period. Mesolithic, Upper Palaeolithic or before. Boxgrove is Lower Palaeolithic and doesn't have evidence of dwellings, Paviland was a cave occupied during the UP, and Channel Islands don't have any Palaeolithic dwelling structures recovered either as far as I know (caves again... but when it's cold, your cave isn't going to be enough to keep you from shivering away all your calories!). Absence of the evidence is not evidence of absence though... even with nice warm clothes and a fire, if you don't have a good shelter you are cooooooold even in temperate climates. So it's pretty safe to assume they were there and they've just not left their traces. Not everything preserves, unfortunately.

Not a lot to go on if we're trying to say 'this is what an Upper Palaeolithic shelter was definitely like', and we're not. We're talking about shelter necessity in the Palaeolithic.