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40-592: Remains of pile dwellings were discovered in the Ljubljana Marsh as early as in 1875. Since 2011, the site has been protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as an example of prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps , a special form of dwellings in areas with lakes and marshes. The archaeologists at the excavation site identified over one thousand piles in the bed of the Iška River , near Ig . They reconstructed

80-413: A tenon arrangement, the braces being fitted into tenoned slots carved into the two main wheel sections. Pile dwellings Stilt houses (also called pile dwellings or lake dwellings ) are houses raised on stilts (or piles) over the surface of the soil or a body of water . Stilt houses are built primarily as a protection against flooding ; they also keep out vermin . The shady space under

120-534: A turtle and built over water surface (e.g. rivers). Arbi et al. (2013) have also noted the striking similarities between Austronesian architecture and Japanese traditional raised architecture ( shinmei-zukuri ). Particularly the buildings of the Ise Grand Shrine , which contrast with the pit-houses typical of the Neolithic Yayoi period . They propose significant Neolithic contact between

160-865: A prehistoric Austronesian network. In South Asia, stilt houses are very common in Northeast India , specifically the Brahmaputra Valley regions of Assam , which is extremely prone to regional flooding from the Brahmaputra. These houses are known as chang ghar in Assamese , and as kare okum in Mising ; chang ghar are traditionally built by the Mising people , who live along the Brahmaputra. Unlike many forms of traditional architecture, including stilt architecture, in South and Southeast Asia,

200-425: A single tall post also had ritual importance and were used to isolate high-born children during their training for leadership. The majority of Austronesian structures are not permanent. They are made from perishable materials like wood, bamboo, plant fiber, and leaves. Because of this, archaeological records of prehistoric Austronesian structures are usually limited to traces of house posts, with no way of determining

240-553: Is a 15–60 km wide region within the Atlantic Coastal Plain province, along the inland margin of this province. The Carolina Sandhills are interpreted as eolian (wind-blown) sand sheets and dunes that were mobilized episodically approximately 75,000 to 6,000 years ago. Most of the published luminescence ages from the sand are coincident with the last glaciation, a time when the southeastern United States had colder air temperatures and stronger winds. The area above

280-678: The Late Neolithic . In the late 20th century, stilt houses in extremely calm ocean water became a popular form of tourist lodging known as overwater bungalows ; the trend began in French Polynesia and quickly spread to other tourist locations, especially in tropical locales. Stilt houses in China known as guījiǎfángwū ( simplified Chinese : 龟甲房屋 ; traditional Chinese : 龜甲房屋 ; lit. 'turtle shell house') because Chinese stilt house structures inspired from

320-844: The Ljubljana Marsh in Slovenia and at the Mondsee and Attersee lakes in Upper Austria , for example. Early archaeologists like Ferdinand Keller thought they formed artificial islands, much like the Irish and Scottish crannogs , but today it is clear that the majority of settlements were located on the shores of lakes and were only inundated later on. Reconstructed stilt houses are shown in open-air museums in Unteruhldingen and Zürich (Pfahlbauland). In June 2011,

360-542: The Mesolithic , they built temporary residences on isolated rocks in the marsh and on the fringe, living by hunting and gathering. The permanent settlements were not built until the first farmers appeared approximately 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic . The wooden wheel belonged to a prehistoric two-wheel cart – a pushcart. Similar wheels have been found in the hilly regions of Switzerland and southwest Germany, but

400-632: The Mosquito Coast in northeastern Nicaragua , and in northern Brazil as well as the bayou parts of the Southern United States and the hurricane prone Florida Keys and South Carolina Lowcountry . Houses where permafrost is present, in the Arctic , are built on stilts to keep permafrost under them from melting. Permafrost can be up to 70% water. While frozen, it provides a stable foundation. However, if heat radiating from

440-622: The Sea Islands . The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an important source of biodiversity in South Carolina. Once known for its slave-based agricultural wealth in rice and indigo , crops that flourished in the hot subtropical climate, the Lowcountry today is known for its historic cities and communities, natural environment , cultural heritage, and tourism industry. Demographically,

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480-691: The prehistoric pile dwellings in six Alpine states were designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites . A single Scandinavian pile dwelling, the Alvastra stilt houses , has been excavated in Sweden. Herodotus has described in his Histories the dwellings of the "lake-dwellers" in Paeonia and how those were constructed. In the Alps, similar buildings, known as raccards , are still in use as granaries. In England, granaries are placed on staddle stones , similar to stilts, to prevent mice and rats getting to

520-622: The "Rice Pharaohs" who would create generational wealth with them and their descendants dominating South Carolinian politics in an effort to preserve slavery at all costs. The center of the rice industry was based around the confluence of the Waccamaw , the Great Peedee and Black Rivers due to the abundance of sediment deposits, a region that was compared to the Nile river in Egypt . Due to

560-643: The 20th century. The tourism commission advertises both nature-based tourism and historic sites. The pressure of the tourism industry on the coast both encroaches on marshland and places pressure on African American communities. The industry tends to emphasize the Gullah Geechee cultural tradition as part of the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor . Important to this cultural tradition are traditional sweetgrass baskets. But, harvesting natural sweetgrass

600-728: The Kerala Backwaters have been a traditional method of house construction for many years, following the disastrous 2018 floods in Kerala , many more stilt houses have been constructed recently and utilize concrete as well as timber for their pillars. In the Neolithic , the Copper Age and the Bronze Age , stilt-house settlements were common in the Alpine and Pianura Padana ( Terramare ) regions. Remains have been found at

640-543: The Ljubljana Marshes wheel is bigger and older. It shows that wooden wheels may have appeared almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia and Europe, though finds of actual wheels from Mesopotamia date from significantly later. It has a diameter of 72 centimetres ( 28 + 3 ⁄ 8  in) and is made of ash wood, and its 124-centimetre-long ( 48 + 7 ⁄ 8  in) axle is made of oak . The axle

680-585: The Lowcountry is still heavily dominated by African American communities, such as the Gullah/Geechee people. As of the 2020 census, the population of the Lowcountry was 1,167,139. The term "Low Country" originally referred to all of the states below the Fall Line , or the Sandhills , which run the width of the states from Aiken County to Chesterfield County. The Sandhills, or Carolina Sandhills,

720-774: The Peidmont gentry in the cause for secession . Following the Confederacy 's defeat in the American Civil War , many of the Lowcountry estates had been destroyed by the Union army , with the slaves on the remaining plantations begin emancipated, which finally broke the power of the Lowcountry gentry. Soon timber and phosphate mining became the primary economic power in the Lowcountry, as the remaining rice plantations struggled to compete with those in Texas. The deathblow to

760-468: The Sandhills is known as "Upstate" or "Upcountry". These areas are different in geology, geography, and culture. There are several variations in the geographic extent of the "Lowcountry" area. The most commonly accepted definition includes Charleston , Dorchester , Beaufort , Georgetown , Colleton , Hampton , Berkeley , Jasper , and Williamsburg Counties, often described as the area encompassing

800-568: The banks of the tropical river valleys of South America, notably the Amazon and Orinoco river systems. Stilt houses were such a prevalent feature along the shores of Lake Maracaibo that Amerigo Vespucci was inspired to name the region "Venezuela" (little Venice). As the costs of hurricane damage increase, more and more houses along the Gulf Coast are being built as or converted to stilt houses. Stilt houses are also still common in parts of

840-557: The basins of Cooper River , Santee River , ACE (Ashepoo-Combahee-Edisto), Winyah Bay , and Savannah River . Some include Marion and Horry Counties. Dillon County is included in the Lowcountry by the largest group of healthcare executives in the state. Allendale is also occasionally included in the region. Four counties are covered by the Lowcountry Council of Governments , a regional governmental entity charged with regional and transportation planning, and are

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880-666: The bottom of a home melts the permafrost, the home goes out of level and starts sinking into the ground. Other means of keeping the permafrost from melting are available, but raising the home off the ground on stilts is one of the most effective ways. Raised rectangular houses are one of the cultural hallmarks of the Austronesian peoples and are found throughout the regions in Island Southeast Asia , Island Melanesia , Micronesia , and Polynesia settled by Austronesians. The structures are raised on piles, usually with

920-460: The coastal areas and the sea islands of North Carolina , South Carolina , Georgia and Florida —from Pender County, North Carolina , to St. Johns County, Florida . Coastal South Carolina’s half a million acres of salt marsh, which typifies the Lowcountry in particular, is underlain by plough mud or pluff mud , named for the traditional spelling of plow but now often pronounced to rhyme with rough . Once used to fertilize fields of cotton,

960-614: The construction of chang ghar is making a resurgence and increasing in popularity, as a result of climate change increasing regular flooding in Assam, and the stilts of the chang ghar is adapted to flooding in the first place. The height of the stilts of the chang ghar is determined by the height of the water during the last major flood. Stilt houses are also popular in Kerala in the Kerala backwaters , another regions with high rainfall and regular flooding from monsoons. Although stilt houses in

1000-426: The dwellings of 3.5 by 7 metres (11 ft 6 in × 23 ft 0 in) in size, separated by approximately 2 to 3 metres (6 ft 7 in to 9 ft 10 in). The analyses of the piles revealed that the dwellings were repaired each year and that a new house had to be built on the same place in as little as 10 to 20 years. The earliest inhabitants settled in the region as early as 9,000 years ago. In

1040-549: The grain. In Italy there are several stilt-houses settlements, for example the one on the Rocca di Manerba del Garda . In Scotland there used to be prehistoric stilt houses called crannogs . Stilt houses as water villas are common in the Maldives and Assam . Lowcountry The Lowcountry (sometimes Low Country or just low country ) is a geographic and cultural region along South Carolina 's coast, including

1080-494: The harsh climate and labor intensive work required to harvest rice, planters at the time deemed it "impossible" to cultivate the region. The vast majority of slaves to South Carolina where imported for the rice plantations, and as such the rice pharaohs also become dominate players in the slave trade . Due to this Charleston rapidly grew to facilitate rice exports and slave imports. The rice pharaohs quickly surpassed and replaced other gentry, such as those who grew sugar, due to

1120-471: The highlands or even directly on shallow water. Building structures on pilings is believed to be derived from the design of raised rice granaries and storehouses, which are highly important status symbols among the ancestrally rice-cultivating Austronesians. The rice granary shrine was also the archetypal religious building among Austronesian cultures and was used to store carvings of ancestor spirits and local deities. While rice cultivation wasn't among

1160-572: The hinterland, in an effort to preserve their economic dominance. Timothy Ford, a lawyer born in Trenton, New Jersey , moved to the Lowcountry in 1760 and criticized the gentry as having an "effeminate spirit of luxury and dissipation" and seemingly only cared about amusement, gambling, accumulation of wealth, and vanity. At the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War , a subgroup of Lowcountry gentry emerged to prominence,

1200-916: The house can be used for work or storage. Stilt houses are commonly found in Southeast Asia, Oceania, Central America, the Caribbean, the Gulf Coast of the United States, northern parts of South America, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles and the Maldives. Stilted granaries are also a common feature in West Africa, e.g., in the Malinke language regions of Mali and Guinea . Stilt houses were also built by Amerindians in pre-Columbian times . Palafitos are especially widespread along

1240-448: The mud is pervaded by decaying organic matter and bacteria that feed on it, giving it a notoriously sulfurous stench. Historically the region was dominated by the Lowcountry gentry , a planter aristocracy that dominated most economic activities in the region through extensive plantations. These gentry quickly imported most of the early slaves to South Carolina, and made a concerted effort to outlaw further imports, especially into

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1280-574: The ones included in the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism's "Lowcountry and Resort Islands" area. The area includes the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton-Beaufort, SC Metropolitan Statistical Area . Technically, the Lowcountry is synonymous with the areas with a large population of Gullah Geechee peoples of the region. Gullah Geechee people have traditionally resided in

1320-718: The original building plans. Indirect evidence of traditional Austronesian architecture, however, can be gleaned from their contemporary representations in art, like in friezes on the walls of later Hindu-Buddhist stone temples (like in reliefs in Borobudur and Prambanan ). But these are limited to the recent centuries. They can also be reconstructed linguistically from shared terms for architectural elements, like ridge-poles, thatch, rafters, house posts, hearth, notched log ladders, storage racks, public buildings, and so on. Linguistic evidence also makes it clear that stilt houses were already present among Austronesian groups since at least

1360-683: The people of southern Japan and Austronesians or pre-Austronesians that occurred prior to the spread of Han Chinese cultural influence to the islands. Rice cultivation is also believed to have been introduced to Japan from a para-Austronesian group from coastal eastern China. Waterson (2009) has also argued that the architectural tradition of stilt houses in eastern Asia and the Pacific is originally Austronesian, and that similar building traditions in Japan and mainland Asia (notably among Kra-Dai and Austroasiatic -speaking groups) correspond to contacts with

1400-408: The rice plantations would be a series of hurricanes from 1893 to 1911 which destroyed most of the remaining estates, with their owners being unable to afford to rebuild. Their lands where mostly bought by Northerners to turn into hunting preserves, with only 70,000 acres of rice impoundments existing by 1999. The tourism industry has been a vibrant part of the region's economy since the beginning of

1440-418: The rise of the "Piedmont gentry" who began to erode the economic dominance of the rice pharaohs and Lowcounty gentry as a whole and advocated for further expansions to slavery. In order to compete with inland plantations, the Lowcountry gentry began buying land from Alabama to Texas and advocating for the reopening of the slave trade. By the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 the Lowcountry gentry sided with

1480-514: The space underneath also utilized for storage or domestic animals . The raised design had multiple advantages, they mitigate damage during flooding and (in very tall examples) can act as defensive structures during conflicts. The house posts are also distinctively capped with larger-diameter discs at the top, to prevent vermin and pests from entering the structures by climbing them. Austronesian houses and other structures are usually built in wetlands and alongside bodies of water, but can also be built in

1520-552: The sugar industry's reliance on British trade with the Caribbean , making most of them loyalists during the war. By 1787 the Lowcountry gentry argued in favor of abolishing the import of any new slaves to the United States, as their own plantations where self sufficient, and their slaves reproducing. However, with Eli Whitney 's invention of the cotton gin , South Carolina permitted the import of slaves from 1803 to 1808, almost exclusively to new inland cotton plantations, which saw

1560-515: The technologies carried into Remote Oceania , raised storehouses still survived. The pātaka of the Māori people is such an example. The largest pātaka are elaborately adorned with carvings and are often the tallest buildings in the Māori pā . They were used to store implements, weapons, ships, and other valuables; while smaller pātaka were used to store provisions. A special type of pātaka supported by

1600-447: Was attached to the wheels with oak wood wedges, which meant that the axle rotated together with the wheels. The wheel was made from a tree that grew in the vicinity of the pile dwellings and at the time of the wheel construction was approximately 80 years old. It appears that the wheel itself is primarily made of two planks of wood which are held together with four cross braces. The cross braces appear to have been held in place simply by

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