The popular epithet for our pleistocene forerunners is still ‘cave men’. It gives the impression that they were as completely dependent on Nature’s bounty for shelter as for food. And of course that impression was originally intended by archaeologists themselves. Most remains of middle and upper palaeolithic cultures were, and still are being, collected from caves. Other sites that yielded similar relics have been designated ‘open stations’, with the inevitable, if not deliberate, implication of the absence of any shelter. Yet from many caves there have long been known engravings or paintings that seem to represent tents or more substantial structures and that have been designated ‘tectiforms’ for this very reason. Not all prehistorians accept this obvious interpretation, and few of those who do have realized its significance. Perhaps they were waiting with proper scientific caution for monumental evidence.

Such evidence is now available in plenty. But as it is mostly published in Russian, and badly at that, it has not been at all widely appreciated. Yet the construction of dwellings twenty thousand or more years ago is so striking a fact in cultural history as to justify a summary of the rather inaccessible accounts that have appeared.

Physical remains of the simple tent-like structures inferred from the commoner tectiforms have been identified at Gagarino and Kostienki on the Don in the Ukraine and at Mal’ta and Buryet on the Angara in Siberia. At Gagarino the ‘hut foundation’ was an irregular saucer-shaped excavation in the löss, nowhere more than .50 m. deep, and measuring some 5.50 by 4.50 m. across. A silo trench, dug by peasants, that had originally revealed the archaeological deposit, had cut right through its centre along the major axis thus presumably destroying the hearth and the entrance. Little evidence for the superstructure was left, but Zamyatnin noticed large slabs of stone and mammoth tusks lying near the margins of the depression. This dwelling was occupied by Gravettian mammoth-hunters as was a similar one subsequently discovered at Kostienki below the large ‘communal house’ to be discussed later.