Lecture 1. Dwelling inside the Earth: Plateau Pit Houses

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Anne L Marshall


from the module:

Indigenous Architectures and the Living Landscape of North America

This lecture introduces the Plateau region, the inland northwest of the North American continent. It introduces the geography and Indigenous peoples who lived, and continue to live, in this area. As the first of two lectures on Indigenous architecture in the Plateau area, the lecture presents its oldest type of dwelling, the pit house, and a ceremonial structure, the sweat lodge. This lecture presents pit houses from a cluster that stretches from the Aleutian Islands to the Columbia Plateau. Ancestral Nez Perce villages along the Snake River in Idaho, an ancestral village along the Fraser River in British Columbia, and reconstructions of pit houses are included. The ceremonial structure of the sweat lodge is included too because it is conceptually a womb within Mother Earth. The lecture concludes with several cultural centers inspired by the concept of the pit house.

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Handout

Lecture Notes

Quiz with Answers