Pit-house

A pit-house (or pit house, pithouse) is a house built in the ground and used for shelter.^[1] Besides providing shelter from the most extreme of weather conditions, this type of earth shelter may also be used to store food (just like a pantry, a larder, or a root cellar) and for cultural activities like the telling of stories, dancing, singing and celebrations. General dictionaries also describe a pit-house as a dugout,^[2] and it has similarities to a half-dugout.^[3]

In archaeology, a pit-house is frequently called a sunken-featured building^[4][5] and occasionally (grub-) hut^[6] or grubhouse, after the German name Grubenhaus.^[7] They are found in numerous cultures around the world, including the people of the Southwestern United States, the ancestral Pueblo, the ancient Fremont and Mogollon cultures, the Cherokee, the Inuit, the people of the Plateau, and archaic residents of Wyoming (Smith 2003) in North America; Archaic residents of the Lake Titicaca Basin (Craig 2005) in South America; Anglo-Saxons in Europe; and the Jōmon people in Japan. Some Anglo-Saxon pit-houses may have not been dwellings, but served other purposes.

Usually, all that remains of the ancient pit-house is a dug-out hollow in the ground and any postholes used to support the roof. In the nineteenth century, it was believed that most prehistoric peoples lived in pit-houses, although it has since been proved that many of the features thought of as houses were in fact food prehistoric storage pits or served another purpose.^{[citation needed]}