Building a Thatched Hut

A friend recently asked me to tell her more about my experiences building thatched huts. Since I realize this is not an experience many people have had I will describe it a little here and include a picture. This picture shows the Winter Solstice house with about half of its thatched roof finished (ca. 2002).

For 3 summers I worked at a reconstructed 12th century native american village site/archaeological park called SunWatch (www.sunwatch.org). There are way better photos of the buildings at the official SunWatch website. My job for 2 of those years was to supervise a team of international interns in doing archaeological reconstruction, which essentially means we were building daub and thatch houses using 800 year old post holes as our blueprint. We tried to match wood types, post sizes, roofing material (native Big Blue Stem prairie grass) daubing materials (clay, prairie grass and water) as closely as possible to what appeared in the archaeological record.

For instance, early excavators found intact chunks of burned mud dauber nests when they excavated the site, buried under about 1.5 feet of flood deposited topsoil. These nests were often imprinted with the Big Blue Stem seed heads, this grass being a native and very tough prairie grass. They then looked around to see where mud daubers build their nests currently and they were almost always found at the tops of walls, under the eaves of the roof. This led archaeologists to believe that the ancient mud daubers did much the same thing and since big blue stem seed heads were clearly visible in the nests, that the roofing material largely consisted of big blue prairie grass. This is a simplified and shortened version of all the thought that went into this particular question, but gives you an idea of how these kinds of interpretations are made by archaeologists.

SunWatch is a unique place in that it is an in situ reconstruction meaning it is "on site", in its original pre-historic context. There are not many reconstructed village sites like this one, where you can walk inside the cool shade of a thatched hut, sit on a bench made of rough cut branches and kindle a fire in a hearth that was used some 800 years ago for cooking meals of corn, deer, beans and squash. It truly is a unique experience.

My work at SunWatch was very creative and at times maddening. I loved collecting materials -- looking around the forest for straight black locust trees that were just the right width and height, cutting endless bunches of Big Blue, looking for just the right curve of the piece of wood needed to fortify the corner of the roof and shaping hearth after hearth after hearth, hoping that this time it wouldn't crack as badly when it was fired. This was also my first introduction to medicinal herbs since I put together an exhibit in one of the cabins detailing what types of herbs were found in the archaeological record, how they could be used medicinally and hanging actual bunches of the herbs gathered from our very own prairie for visitors to see, smell and touch.

It was maddening because I question everything and always felt that there wasn't enough critical thought and current research going into the process. That even though SunWatch was a version of a living museum, it was still too heavy on the museum and too light on the living. I felt we needed to be constantly questioning past interpretations, re-interpreting new and old findings and researching old documents and artifacts to see if anything was missed.

I wrote my Master's Thesis on my work at SunWatch -- see the link below. In it I talked about how archaeological data can be used to inform restoration ecology. In using archaeological data, especially botanical data, restoration ecologists can make choices about what set of criteria they are restoring an ecosystem to, rather than arbitrarily picking a generic and 'pristine' ecosystem that existed when Europeans arrived, as if the environment was a static thing and totally unaffected by the native people who were living here.

http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/search.cgi?q=DeAloia&field=&pagesize=30


Anyway, building thatched huts was quite an experience. It is nothing like the thatching that is famous in places like England or Scotland. The kind of thatching I did requires much more maintenance and would never keep a modern house dry. But it was a lot of fun and is a really great conversation starter or pick up line. Hey baby, can I thatch your roof??