In the Middle Ages, the typical type of dwellings were so-called pit houses. These are wooden buildings that are half sunk into the ground. The advantages of this type of construction were many. For example, the stored heat from the surrounding earth was used so that, at any time of the day or year, compared to the outdoor temperature the indoor temperature was more constant than in free-standing buildings. The cost of building the walls was also lower, thus saving on building materials, among other things - but more on that later.
In archaeological excavations, mostly only pits and remains of fireplaces can be found. Since the roof and the walls of the houses were made of organic material such as reeds, straw, wood or clay, they no longer exist. Charred wood and burnt clay are highly durable.
The walls of the pit houses were constructed in different ways, for example from wooden beams using the log construction technique, where the lowest layer either rested on the floor of the pit house or only on the edge of the pit.
If the sides of the roof reached down to the ground, there were often no walls. If the roof was supported by wooden posts, the front and rear walls could be made of wattle. A wattle wall is woven from willow branches and plastered with clay. Today, we have no way of knowing whether these walls were painted.
For practical reasons, the entrances were placed in the direction away from the wind and opposite the ovens. Access to the pit houses was by means of ladders, stairs or ramps.
In most cases there was a stone-built dome oven in one of the corners. It was used to heat the house and often as a cooking area too. Usually, the dome oven was built on a simple clay slab in order to keep the moisture in the ground at bay. Domes made of clay over basket-like woven rods or a construction made of logs were commonplace too. Open stoves were also used for cooking. An additional stove could be dug into the clay wall, i.e. into the soil surrounding the house pit. This was ideal for baking bread.
Some pit houses also served as workshops, for example to weave fabrics. In this case, archaeologists often find only the clay loom weights that stretched the warp threads of the loom.
The size of the pit houses usually varied between 8 and 12 m2. That seems very small from today's perspective, although ethnographic comparisons show that this was sufficient for a family. However, they could also be considerably larger and provide around 20m2 of space.
From the wooden furnishings of these houses - sleeping and seating accommodation, tables and shelves - only small round impressions, so-called plug holes, have survived. We can only speculate about whether there were any windows, how many and how big they were and where they were in the walls.