Prehistory of Roofing

The prehistory of roofing covers the long period before written records, when people sheltered under branches, hides, bark, turf and thatch. Almost none of these materials survive. Archaeologists work instead from post holes, rings of stones or charcoal, collapsed debris and, very occasionally, timber preserved by water or fire. Most statements about prehistoric roofs are therefore reconstructions, and many are debated.

The broad pattern is clear even where details are not. Early shelters were light and temporary; with settled life and farming came heavier, longer-lasting houses whose roofs had to carry thatch, turf or earth for decades.

Lower and Middle Palaeolithic

• Kalambo Falls, Zambia: two logs joined crosswise by a deliberately cut notch, dated by luminescence to at least 476,000 years ago and published in Nature in 2023. They are not a roof, but they are the earliest known structural woodworking, the skill on which every timber roof depends.
• Terra Amata, Nice, France: interpreted by Henry de Lumley in 1966 as a camp of pole-and-hide huts about 400,000 years old. Paola Villa and others argued the stone arrangements and layers may be natural or mixed.
• Lazaret cave, Nice: a line of large stones has been read as packing for the poles of a skin tent pitched against the cave wall, in layers of marine isotope stage 6 (186,000-127,000 years ago).

Evidence for built shelter before about 50,000 years ago is slim, and light structures may leave no clear trace.

Upper Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic

• Ohalo II, Israel: six oval brush-hut floors about 23,000 years old, preserved under the Sea of Galilee.
• Mezhyrich, Ukraine: shelters framed and weighted with mammoth bone; a 2025 study dated the largest to about 18,300-17,800 years ago. The covering is thought to have been hides or birch bark.

Early villages and the Neolithic

• Natufian Levant: round, semi-sunken stone-footed houses at Ain Mallaha, with posts carrying roofs probably of brushwood or hides.
• Pit houses: dwellings sunk into the ground with a roof springing from near ground level, found from Japan's Jomon period and China's Yangshao culture (Banpo) to North America and early medieval Europe.
• Lepenski Vir, Serbia: trapezoidal houses with stone-reinforced floor edges; the roof form is unknown and at least seven reconstructions have been proposed.
• Hemudu, China: stilt houses about 7,000 years old with mortise-and-tenon timber joints.
• Linear Pottery (LBK) longhouses, central Europe: timber houses up to 45 m (148 ft) long, with thatched roofs carried on three internal rows of posts.
• Orkney, Scotland: sandstone roof slabs at the Ness of Brodgar are the first firm evidence of a Neolithic roof there.

Bronze and Iron Ages

In Britain and Ireland the roundhouse with a conical roof was standard from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. Experiments at Butser Ancient Farm found a pitch of about 45 degrees worked well. At Must Farm, Cambridgeshire, roundhouses on stilts burned and fell into a river about 850 BCE, preserving rafters, turf and clay roof layers. Crannogs, artificial islands in lakes, carried similar houses in Scotland and Ireland.

What archaeology can and cannot show

Post-hole plans show where the main supports stood and therefore the likely span, but not the pitch, ridge height or covering. Charred or waterlogged sites, such as Ohalo II and Must Farm, are rare windows onto actual roof materials. Experimental reconstructions test what is structurally possible and how long materials last; they do not prove what was built. Ethnographic comparison with recent thatch, bark, turf and earth roofs fills further gaps, with the risk that modern habits are projected onto the past.