Wood came first
The oldest clear evidence of building that we have is made of wood. At Kalambo Falls, in Zambia, two logs at least 476,000 years old lie one across the other, locked by a notch somebody cut on purpose. They survived only because the riverbank kept them wet and airless, which tells you how much else has been lost.
Wood ruled everyday building for a simple reason: it is strong for its weight, easy to shape and easy to repair. The basic frame is two posts and a beam; diagonal braces stop it swaying, and frames set side by side make a building longer. Joints show skill. In a mortise and tenon, a tongue cut on one timber fits a pocket in another and a peg locks it, while lashings of fibre or rawhide bind what was hard to drill. When the wood has gone, rows of postholes in the ground still give you the plan of huts, pit houses and longhouses.
Walls of earth
Earth is free, and early builders found at least four ways of standing it up. Wattle and daub is a lattice of woven sticks smeared with a paste of clay, sand and straw; it goes up fast, dries hard and still lets moisture out. Cob is the same kind of mix laid by hand in thick lumps. Rammed earth is damp soil packed hard, layer by layer, inside simple forms, and makes walls that warm up and cool down slowly. Turf is blocks of sod stacked grass side down, good insulation where timber is scarce and rain is not.
Cracks were expected. A daub wall was wetted and recoated as part of normal upkeep, a bit like repainting a window frame, and archaeologists find lumps of fallen daub still carrying the prints of the reeds and fingers behind them. In wet places, a base of stones kept walls off the ground and deep eaves kept rain off them.
Roofs of reed, bark and hide
Roofs decided a lot about the rooms below. Thatch, bundles of straw or reed tied in thick layers, needs a steep pitch so rain runs off. Bark sheets allow gentler slopes. Where timber was thin, hides and woven mats were stretched over light frames, and rawhide, which shrinks as it dries, tightened joints all by itself. A smoke hole above the hearth cleared the air and pushed seating into a ring around the fire.
When there are no trees: bone
On the treeless steppe of Ice Age Europe, people built with the biggest bones around. At Kostenki 11, in Russia, they set the bones of at least 60 mammoths into a ring about 12.5 m across, around 25,000 years ago. Few tools were found inside, and such a wide space would have been hard to roof, so it may have served for storage or gatherings more than for sleeping. Elsewhere, mammoth ribs and tusks were probably covered with hides to make low shelters that shed the wind.
Bone survives only in cold or waterlogged ground, so much of what was built with it is lost. Where wood was scarce and stone plentiful, people turned to stone instead: on Orkney, the villagers of Skara Brae made even their dressers and beds from flagstone.
Stone, clay and colour
Stone was a material for tools long before it was a material for walls. Flint was flaked into blades, scrapers and points; harder stones were ground into axes and grinding slabs. In building, stone went where something had to last or be seen: foundations, hearths, standing stones and dolmens, and later the dry-stone towers of Bronze Age Sardinia.
Clay was plastered onto walls and floors, modelled into figures and eventually fired. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice, made in what is now the Czech Republic between about 31,000 and 25,000 years ago, is one of the oldest known objects of fired clay, from long before clay was used for pots in Europe. Colour came from the ground too: ochre, an earth coloured by iron oxides, for reds and yellows, charcoal and manganese for black, on cave walls, bodies, objects and plastered houses. How painters mixed and applied them changed from site to site.
Built to be repaired
Every material came with a cost. Wattle and daub is fast but needs patching; rammed earth is solid but slow; thatch is warm and light but wants a steep roof and regular combing; turf insulates well but sags if the drainage fails. Prehistoric builders accepted those cycles and planned around them, patching walls after the harvest and rethatching before winter. A freshly coated wall may also have told the neighbours that the household was still there.
Where to see these materials
Skara Brae, in Orkney, shows stone furniture in place. Open-air museums across Europe have rebuilt wattle and daub houses, turf houses and lakeside pile dwellings at full size, often with the techniques described here. The Venus of Dolní Věstonice is in the Moravian Museum in Brno, though fragile originals are sometimes swapped for replicas, so check 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).
- A. J. E. Pryor et al., “The chronology and function of a new circular mammoth-bone structure at Kostenki 11”, Antiquity 94 (2020).
- Historic Environment Scotland, “Skara Brae”.
- English Heritage, “Prehistoric Roundhouses”.
- Moravian Museum, Brno, “Venus of Dolní Věstonice”.
