Dugout (shelter)

A dugout or dug-out, also known as a pit-house or earth lodge, is a shelter for humans or domesticated animals and livestock based on a hole or depression dug into the ground.

These structures are one of the most ancient types of human housing known to archaeologists, and the same methods have evolved into modern "earth shelter" technology.

Floods and the Victorian gold rush effectively ended the large scale use of dugouts in Burra, but people were still being 'washed' out of the creek in 1859.

[1] Coober Pedy is a small outback town in northern South Australia, 846 kilometres north of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway, where opal mining is the dominant industry.

Most residents live in caves excavated[2] into the hillsides to avoid the harsh summer temperatures and work underground in mine shafts.

In north China, especially on the Loess Plateau, caves called yaodongs dug into hillsides have been the traditional dwellings from early times.

Many people live in semi-recessed dugout houses in north-western China where hot summers and cold winters prevail.

Cappadocia contains at least 36 historical underground cities, carved out of unusual geological formations formed via the eruptions of ancient volcanoes.

In Iceland, since time immemorial and well into the 20th century, most houses were partly dug down, with turf or sod walls built up and roofs made of timber and turf/sod.

A small number of these huts survive, and can be seen in the open air museums of Arnhem, Schoonoord, Barger-Compascuum and Harkema.

Entry was effected by a passage not much wider than a fox burrow, which sloped downwards 10 or 12 ft. to the floor of the house; the inside was oval in shape, and was walled with overlapping rough stone slabs; the roof frequently reached to within a foot of the Earth's surface; they probably served as storehouses, winter quarters, and as places of refuge in times of war.

Many of the ancient peoples of the American continents built semi-permanent houses of poles and brush plastered with mud over a shallow pit in the earth.

The Doukhobor Dugout House in Blaine Lake, Saskatchewan was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 2008.

The emergence of the pithouse marks the transition between a nomadic hunting-and-gathering livelihood and a settled agricultural way of life which also relied on wild plants and animals for food.

Historian Linda Cordell notes that ...the late pithouses are often clues to relatively short-term changes in settlement location and adjustment to climatic fluctuations.

The sunken floor of the dwelling is below the frost line and helps moderate both winter and summer temperatures, with the mass of the ground serving as an insulator.

Excavations reveal examples based on squares, rectangles and shapes similar to the letter D. These homes were also warmed by a centralized hearth, a fire pit with an air deflector, and side vents and a smoke hole in the roof provided fresh air and evacuated smoke.

Interior space was often loosely divided into two rooms, one for storing personal and dry goods and the other as living quarters.

Settlers on the newly opened Great Plains found there were not enough trees to build familiar log cabins.

The strip could be cut into two foot sections, four to six inches deep, to make an almost perfect building block with good insulating properties.

Walls were lined with newspapers pasted or pinned up with small, sharpened sticks to keep dirt from flaking into the home's interior.

When a family built a house of logs or boards, their domestic animals often continued to be sheltered in a sod dugout.

[10] Mennonites from Imperial Russia also built burdeis as temporary shelters when they settled in the Hillsboro region of Kansas.

[12] The level of activity can be gauged by the fact that during 1917 and 1918, more people lived underground in the Ypres area than reside in the town today.

[13] In World War II, partisans, or armed resistance fighters in Eastern Europe sometimes lived in dugouts called zemlyankas (Russian or Ukrainian: Землянка) which were used as underground bunkers to provide shelter and a hiding place from enemies.