fl ooding season inland or the annual high tide near the sea.
Even during the late Shang Dynasty, builders used primar-
ily stone tools, with bronze being reserved for weapons and
household goods such as pots. By the end of the Zhou Dy-
nasty iron was commonly used for axes and picks as well as
for woodworking tools.
Chinese building techniques were imitated in Japan and
the region of modern Th ailand, and they spread to the west
and southwest as the Chinese Empire grew. Th e homes of
most Japanese were made of wooden walls and thatched roofs
and were round or oval. In Korea and northern Vietnam,
Chinese building techniques arrived with the migration of
Chinese beginning during the Zhou Dynasty, with Koreans
becoming masters of the craft of building by the 200s c.e. and
carrying their skills fi rst to the Japanese island of Kyushu in
the 300s and Honshu in the 400s.
EUROPE
BY JUDITH A. RASSON
People throughout prehistory used locally available building
materials that were assembled in diff erent ways with little al-
teration beyond basic shaping. Th ey did not use building ma-
terials that required many steps in preparation, such as roof
tiles, which had to be fi red before they could be used. Th e
people of the Paleolithic cultural period (in the Pleistocene
geological period, which ended about 8000 b.c.e.) were no-
madic hunters, relying only on wild animals and plants for
food. To fi nd food, they moved from place to place several
times during the year. Conveniently located caves provided
campsites, but elsewhere they built shelters. Th e structures
they built did not require a great deal of investment in labor
or materials.
Archaeologists think that they used animal skins to make
tents or sometimes piled pieces of shrubs against a framework
of saplings to make shelters. Examples of temporary dwell-
ings have been found in France and Ukraine, among other
places. What they have in common is stones or other heavy
objects encircling the fl oor, probably used to hold the walls in
place, and poles supporting a roof. Th e covering of the roofs
is not known for sure; it may have been branches or skins. In
France (at Terra Amata, dating to about 36,000 b.c.e.) stones
outlined the tent or hut and poles around the edges and in the
center supported a roof of some kind. At the Paleolithic site of
Mezhirich in Ukraine (dating to 13,000 b.c.e.) lower jaws of
mammoths were nested together to form the fl oor and tusks
held up the roof.
Later, aft er climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene,
people began to control the breeding of plants and animals
for food instead of relying only on wild foods. Domesticated
plants and animals characterized the economy of the Neo-
lithic and the subsequent Bronze and Iron Ages (broadly,
7000 b.c.e–500 c.e.). Relying on domesticated food resources
meant that people settled in villages, where they lived all year
round. Th ey needed to construct buildings that were more
substantial and usually larger than earlier buildings and
would last longer than a tent or brush shelter.
Th e main building materials of the Neolithic, Bronze
Age, and Iron Age were wood and shrubs (brush, slender
branches, planks, and posts), stone, clay, plant materials such
as chaff and straw, and sod (in some areas). Th e way raw ma-
terials were used and the shapes and sizes of structures var-
ied across Europe. All the raw materials were used without
further processing other than shaping. People throughout
Europe took advantage of local resources to construct a wide
range of buildings.
Stone was not generally used for walls unless wood was
scarce, as in the area around the Neolithic settlement of Ska-
ra Brae in Scotland (dating to 3100–2500 b.c.e.), which was
wind swept and mostly treeless. Stone was the main building
material; even the furniture was made of stone. Houses were
dug into the ground and had an inner and outer wall of dry-
laid sandstone slabs with earth packed between them. Earth
also covered the roofs; the beams may have been made of
drift wood. On Dartmoor in England granite was abundant,
and during the Bronze Age natural slabs were set upright in
circles to form walls. Th e roofs were probably made of wild
shrubs like heather or straw or perhaps pieces of sod. Dur-
ing the Iron Age in Ireland underground chambers (called
souterrains) lined with stone were built below wooden struc-
tures. Even when stone was used, it was dry-laid; mortar,
which starts with a chemical reaction, was not used until Ro-
man times.
Wood in many forms was a common building material
in prehistory. Hard, durable tree trunks of oak or ash of-
ten served as the main posts of the structural framework.
Smaller withes, or slender branches, of fl exible wood such
as hazel fi lled in the walls, oft en as wattle. Clay mixed with
chaff or other fi ne-textured vegetal material was used as
daub, or plaster, for the walls. Th e added organic materi-
als left tiny openings in the clay so it would dry and also
reduced the weight a bit. Th e walls were built directly on
the ground surface or in foundation ditches. Th ere were no
separate foundations, so eventually the posts and walls de-
cayed, leaving only the post holes and ditches. Much of the
information archaeologists have about prehistoric building
materials was preserved when the buildings burned down,
preserving impressions of wood and other plant material in
the remaining mud plaster.
In Central and Eastern Europe during the Neolithic
and Bronze Age, wooden posts dug into the ground formed
the framework of structures. Th e walls were made of wat-
tle thickly plastered with daub, most oft en made from clay
mixed with chaff. Straw was used to thatch the roofs. Houses
built in this way are known from numerous sites: in Germany
(the Neolithic site of Köln-Lindenthal), Poland (the Neolith-
ic settlements of Brześć Kujawski and Olszanica), Hungary
(Neolithic site of Herpaly), Serbia (Neolithic settlements of
Vinča, Divostin, and Selevac), and elsewhere. Similar con-
struction techniques continued in use during the Bronze Agebuilding techniques and materials: Europe 157