Stilt house
From Freepedia
Stilt houses or pile dwellings are houses raised on stilts over the surface of the soil or a body of water.
In the Neolithic and Bronze Age, pile dwellings were common in the Alpine region. Remains have been found at the Mondsee and Attersee lakes in Upper Austria, for example. Early archaeologists like Ferdinand Keller thought they formed artificial islands, much like the Scottish Crannogs, but today it is clear that the majority of settlements was located on the shores of lakes and were only inundated later on. Reconstructed pile dwellings are shown in open air museums in Unteruhldingen and Zürich (Pfahlbauland). A single Scandinavian pile dwelling, the Alvastra pile dwelling, has been excavated in Sweden.
Today, stilt houses are still common in parts of South East Asia, Papua New Guinea and West Africa. In the Alps, similar buildings, known as raccards, are still in use as granaries.
Types of stilt house
- Kelong - built primarily for fishing, but often doubling up as offshore dwellings in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.
- Pang uk - a special kind of house found in Tai O, Lantau, Hong Kong, mainly built by Tankas.
- Papua New Guinea stilt house - a kind of stilt house constructed by Motuans, commonly found in the southern coastal area of PNG.
- Thai stilt house - a kind of house often built on freshwater, e.g. a lotus pond.
- Vietnamese stilt house - similar to the Thai ones, despite having a front door with a smaller height due to religious reasons.
Lake Dwelling
A lake dwelling is a house or other structure built over shallow waters, such as a lake or marsh, supported on piles or artificial mounds of earth or wood. Prehistoric lake dwellers lived in all continents save Australia and Antarctica; the most famous of these were the Neolithic inhabitants of what is now the European Alps.
