Half a million years of building in wood
In 2023 a team led by Larry Barham published two logs from the waterlogged banks of the Kalambo river, in Zambia. One lies across the other, held in place by a notch cut on purpose, and they are at least 476,000 years old: older than our own species. Whoever made them was already shaping tree trunks into something bigger than a tool.
Almost everything built after that has vanished too, because people built with what rots. Archaeologists read a house from the stains it left. A posthole is the dark mark of a timber that decayed in the ground, and a ring or a row of them gives you the size of the building; a hearth is ash and reddened soil; a floor is a thin layer packed hard by feet. Most early homes were wood, earth and reed, patched every season, and those patches slowly became the plan.
Plans changed with climate and with the number of people under one roof. Round huts pull everyone towards the fire; rectangular rooms separate sleeping, storage and work; in cold places the floor sinks into the ground for warmth. The forms of huts, pit houses and longhouses each answered a different problem.
Monuments before farming
For a long time the textbook order was simple: first farming, then villages, then monuments. Göbekli Tepe, on a hill in south-eastern Turkey, upset it. Between about 9600 and 8200 BCE, groups of hunter-gatherers raised round and oval enclosures of stone there, with T-shaped limestone pillars up to 5.5 m tall, carved with foxes, boars, snakes and birds, and on some of them human arms and hands. They had no metal tools and, as far as we know, no fields.
What were the enclosures for? Gatherings, feasts and ritual are the usual answers, and the debate is lively. The effort itself is not in doubt: many people working together on stone, before anyone had settled down to farm. The site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2018.
Houses on stilts
On the shores of Alpine lakes and wet meadows, people drove timber posts into the soft ground and raised their houses on them, above damp and floods, with walkways between. More than 1,000 such settlements are known around the Alps, built between about 5000 and 500 BCE, and in 2011 a selection of 111 sites in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France, Austria and Slovenia became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The mud did archaeologists a favour. Waterlogged and airless, it kept wood, textiles, seeds and tools, so tree rings in a post can date the year it was felled, sometimes even the season. Few prehistoric buildings anywhere can be dated so precisely.
Standing stones and stone circles
Big stones arrived in western Europe from the fifth millennium BCE. At Carnac, in Brittany, about 3,000 stones stand in rows, most of them set up between about 4800 and 3500 BCE; since July 2025 the megaliths of Carnac and the Morbihan coast have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our guide to menhirs, dolmens and stone circles takes each form in turn.
Stonehenge shows how slowly such places grew. Around 3000 BCE it was a circular ditch and bank. Around 2500 BCE the central stones went up: big sarsens, most of them probably from West Woods, about 25 km away, and smaller bluestones from the Preseli Hills in Wales. In 2024 a study showed that the six-tonne Altar Stone came from the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland, some 750 km away. The lintels sit on their uprights with mortise and tenon joints, a carpenter’s joint copied in stone, and the main axis points to the midsummer sunrise.
Towers of dry stone
In Bronze Age Sardinia, the love of big stone took a different shape. About 7,000 nuraghi survive there: towers built without mortar, with a round room roofed by rings of stones stepped inwards and a staircase inside the thickness of the wall. The oldest probably date to around 1700 to 1600 BCE, and many grew into small castles with villages of round huts around them. Sardinia’s nuraghi are among the most ambitious uses of dry stone in Bronze Age Europe.
How archaeologists know
No single method decides. Thin slices of soil under the microscope show ash, trampling and repairs; pollen and plant remains show what grew nearby; radiocarbon dates organic remains and tree rings date timber; airborne laser scanning finds banks, ditches and post patterns under fields and woods. When several of these point to the same building, confidence grows. When they disagree, the drawing changes.
Where to see it
Göbekli Tepe is near Şanlıurfa, in south-eastern Turkey, with a visitor centre and walkways over the enclosures. Several reconstructed pile-dwelling villages around the Alps show what the houses looked like. Stonehenge, Carnac, Skara Brae in Orkney and Su Nuraxi in Sardinia are all open to visitors, some only with a guide, so check the official websites before you go.
Sources
- L. Barham et al., “Evidence for the earliest structural use of wood at least 476,000 years ago”, Nature 622 (2023).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Göbekli Tepe” (2018); “Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps” (2011); “Megaliths of Carnac and of the shores of Morbihan” (2025); “Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites”.
- English Heritage, “Building Stonehenge”.
- A. J. I. Clarke et al., “A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge”, Nature 632 (2024).
- Fondazione Barumini, “Su Nuraxi of Barumini”.
- Historic England, “Using Airborne Lidar in Archaeological Survey” (2018).
