Stilt house

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
City of Yawnghwe in the Inle Lake, Myanmar

Stilt houses (also called pile dwellings or lake dwellings) are houses raised on

flooding;[1] they also keep out vermin.[2] The shady space under the house can be used for work or storage.[3]
Stilt houses are commonly found in Southeast Asia, Oceania, Central America, Caribbean, northern parts of South America, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and the Maldives.

Arctic

Summer family dwellings of the natives of the Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia) called Itelmens or Kamchadals. Their winter dwellings were earth-sheltered and communal.

Houses where permafrost is present, in the Arctic, are built on stilts to keep permafrost under them from melting. Permafrost can be up to 70% water. While frozen, it provides a stable foundation. However, if heat radiating from the bottom of a home melts the permafrost, the home goes out of level and starts sinking into the ground. Other means of keeping the permafrost from melting are available, but raising the home off the ground on stilts is one of the most effective ways.

Indo-Pacific

See also: Austronesian peoples § Architecture
granaries[4]

Raised rectangular houses are one of the cultural hallmarks of the

domestic animals. The raised design had multiple advantages, they mitigate damage during flooding and (in very tall examples) can act as defensive structures during conflicts. The house posts are also distinctively capped with larger-diameter discs at the top, to prevent vermin and pests from entering the structures by climbing them. Austronesian houses and other structures are usually built in wetlands and alongside bodies of water, but can also be built in the highlands or even directly on shallow water.[5][4][6][7]

Reconstruction of Latte period Chamorro buildings raised on capped stone pillars called haligi

Building structures on pilings is believed to be derived from the design of raised rice

granaries and storehouses, which are highly important status symbols among the ancestrally rice-cultivating Austronesians.[4][7] The rice granary shrine was also the archetypal religious building among Austronesian cultures and was used to store carvings of ancestor spirits and local deities.[7] While rice cultivation wasn't among the technologies carried into Remote Oceania, raised storehouses still survived. The pataka of the Māori people is an example. The largest pataka are elaborately adorned with carvings and are often the tallest buildings in the Māori pā. These were used to store implements, weapons, ships, and other valuables; while smaller pataka were used to store provisions. A special type of pataka supported by a single tall post also had ritual importance and were used to isolate high-born children during their training for leadership.[4]

The majority of Austronesian structures are not permanent. They are made from perishable materials like wood, bamboo, plant fiber, and leaves. Because of this, archaeological records of prehistoric Austronesian structures are usually limited to traces of house posts, with no way of determining the original building plans.

friezes on the walls of later Hindu-Buddhist stone temples (like in reliefs in Borobudur and Prambanan). But these are limited to the recent centuries. They can also be reconstructed linguistically from shared terms for architectural elements, like ridge-poles, thatch, rafters, house posts, hearth, notched log ladders, storage racks, public buildings, and so on. Linguistic evidence also makes it clear that stilt houses were already present among Austronesian groups since at least the Late Neolithic.[6][7]

Arbi et al. (2013) have also noted the striking similarities between Austronesian architecture and Japanese traditional raised architecture (

Austroasiatic-speaking groups) correspond to contacts with a prehistoric Austronesian network.[7][10]

In South Asia, stilt houses are very common in Northeast India, specifically the Brahmaputra Valley regions of Assam, which is extremely prone to regional flooding from the Brahmaputra. These houses are known as chang ghar in Assamese, and as kare okum in Mising; chang ghar are traditionally built by the Mising people, who live along the Brahmaputra. Unlike many forms of traditional architecture, including stilt architecture, in South and Southeast Asia, the construction of chang ghar is making a resurgence and increasing in popularity, as a result of climate change increasing regular flooding in Assam, and the stilts of the chang ghar is adapted to flooding in the first place.[11] The height of the stilts of the chang ghar is determined by the height of the water during the last major flood.[12]

Stilt houses are also popular in Kerala in the Kerala backwaters, another regions with high rainfall and regular flooding from monsoons. Although stilt houses in the Kerala Backwaters have been a traditional method of house construction for many years, following the disastrous 2018 floods in Kerala, many more stilt houses have been constructed recently and utilize concrete as well as timber for their pillars.[13][14]

Stilt houses in China known as guījiǎfángwū (simplified Chinese: 龟甲房屋; traditional Chinese: 龜甲房屋; lit. 'turtle shell house') because Chinese stilt house structures inspired from a turtle and built over water surface (e.g. rivers).

In the late 20th century, stilt houses in extremely calm ocean water became a popular form of tourist lodging known as overwater bungalows; the trend began in French Polynesia and quickly spread to other tourist locations, especially in tropical locales.

Americas

Palafitos in Castro, Chiloé Archipelago, Chile
Stilt houses on the banks of the Mississippi in Iowa

Stilt houses were also built by

Gulf Coast are being built as or converted to stilt houses.[15]

Stilt houses are also still common in parts of the

Lowcountry
.

Africa

Stilted granaries are also a common feature in West Africa, e.g., in the Malinke language regions of Mali and Guinea.

Europe

Palafittes of Ledro, Italy
Lake Constance, Pfahlbaumuseum Unteruhldingen
, Germany
In Traunkirchen at Lake Traun in Upper Austria, archaeologists from the University of Innsbruck are researching the only Iron Age lakeside settlement currently known in Austria.

In the

Terramare) regions.[17] Remains have been found at the Ljubljana Marsh in Slovenia and at the Mondsee and Attersee lakes in Upper Austria
, for example.

Early

Ferdinand Keller thought they formed artificial islands, much like the Irish and Scottish crannogs, but today it is clear that the majority of settlements were located on the shores of lakes and were only inundated later on.[18]

Reconstructed stilt houses are shown in

Alvastra stilt houses, has been excavated in Sweden.[citation needed] Herodotus has described in his Histories the dwellings of the "lake-dwellers" in Paeonia and how those were constructed.[19]

In the Alps, similar buildings, known as raccards, are still in use as granaries. In England, granaries are placed on staddle stones, similar to stilts, to prevent mice and rats getting to the grain.

In Italy there are several stilt-houses settlements, for example the one on the Rocca di Manerba del Garda.

In Scotland there used to be prehistoric stilt houses called crannogs.[20]

Types

Tourism

Stilt houses as water villas are common in the Maldives and Assam.

Gallery

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-8223-3289-3
    . Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  2. ISBN 978-81-8332-295-9
    . Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  3. ^ Cambodian Heritage Camp yearbook. Archived from the original on 2017-11-11. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  4. ^ a b c d Sato, Koji (1991). "Menghuni Lumbung: Beberapa Pertimbangan Mengenai Asal-Usul Konstruksi Rumah Panggung di Kepulauan Pasifik". Antropologi Indonesia. 49: 31–47.
  5. ISBN 978-0-521-65630-6
    . Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  6. ^
    S2CID 145591097
    .
  7. ^
    ISBN 9789814762762
    .
  8. ISBN 9789715425797
    .
  9. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-002E-8635-7
    .
  10. ISBN 9789004253858
    .
  11. ^ "India's Mising community seeks to expand its indigenous adaptation practices in response to climate change". www.preventionweb.net. 21 September 2021. Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  12. ^ "India's Mising tribe lives in traditional flood-resilient homes to adapt to climate change". Global Voices. 2022-02-09. Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  13. ISSN 0971-751X
    . Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  14. ^ "'Stilt houses can defy floodwaters' | Kochi News - Times of India". The Times of India. TNN. Aug 14, 2019. Retrieved 2022-05-11.
  15. ^ "Fortified Home Design Pioneered on the Texas Gulf Coast". Texasgulfcoastonline.com. Archived from the original on 2008-09-07. Retrieved 2012-08-01.
  16. ISBN 978-1-56308-271-9
    . Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  17. ISBN 978-1-59942-983-0
    . Retrieved 28 March 2011.
  18. ISBN 978-0-415-31720-7
    . Retrieved 29 March 2011.
  19. ^ Herodotus, Histories, 5.16
  20. ^ "What is a Crannog? – the Scottish Crannog Centre".

External links

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