Looks Good!! Only addition I would do it to add chimney holes so that the smoke from the fires below to escape up thru the roof. And perhaps on the large circular structure on the lower right, make the wooden columns a smidge bigger so they are more apparent.

These would be quite useful for a game I'm running right now. (And Looypsue's right on the "chimney," it'd normally just be a hole in the roof at the highest point.)

Reconstructive archaeology strongly suggests Celtic roundhouses would NOT have had smokeholes or chimneys in their roofs, because this encourages cold air to flow in from the outside, meaning the fire fails to heat the interior properly. The smoke will make its way out through the thatch without affecting the interior much (the centre of the roof is remarkably high compared with modern building ceilings, for instance). Plus it could have allowed the smoking - so preservation - of meats by hanging them from the higher rafters indoors.

A couple of fairly straightforward websites with handy images of modern reconstructed roundhouses, more or less randomly plucked from the top of a quick search online are here and here.

Looking good though Scott, if maybe a bit too neat and uniform. Will you be adding the characteristic drainage gully, also known as a drip-trench, for the ground surface around the roof edges?

Wonder if they got respiratory diseases (though the carcinogens would have been MUCH lower than tobacco products). And the reconstructions I went to in Ireland last year had no smoke hole, for the very reasons Wyvern mentioned.

Thanks, Wyvern. That's pretty much what I found out in my research, too -- no chimneys or smoke holes. The smoke just seeped through the top of the thatch.

Posted By: pvernonBy the way these are wonderful you should continue the project!

I'd love to see a new map style in an annual.

Thanks, everyone. If there's interest I will continue. An Iron Age annual might be interesting, but that's up to the PF folks. I hope at some point to do a medieval village (blacksmith, mill, carriage house, potter, guard posts, etc.), too, as well as a few "other" style structures (yurts, teepees... etc.).

Sure, Sue, that would be great. Building the templates and figuring each angle for the fill and then each angle for shadowing (directional and height) took a bit of work. Although now I have that and can use it in other circular buildings!

I do think I am going to go and rework some of these and "rough them up" a bit. They look too perfect. Also trying to figure out a better way to do the large round building with the deck so that it is more apparent that that is a raised deck around it. I'm thinking of saving them as two separate symbols so they would produce two separate shadows. That would help.

Was going to add smoke to some of the buildings, but again, I think I'll save that as separate symbols so smoke can be added as needed, and in the direction wanted instead of being a part of the building symbol and stuck going in one direction...

Loopysue commented:No wonder they had such very short lives...

And Quenten followed-up with:Wonder if they got respiratory diseases (though the carcinogens would have been MUCH lower than tobacco products).

Yeah; not sure the minor amount of smoke in a house would really constitute much of a problem, compared to, y'know, warfare, disease, famine, accidents, etc., all so popular in the European Iron Age ;)

Back closer to topic. Thatch discoloration would be possible, especially on poorly-maintained structures, due to things like moss, lichen and algae (though the smoke would discourage things like this, and destructive activity by insects and birds, so the top might be relatively "cleaner" than other parts of the roof). Repairs, while possible, would likely be only to minor areas, because the nature of thatched roofs tends to mean it's better to replace the whole thing in one go than try to keep patching it up.

It would certainly be good to have more options for buildings other than medieval tiled forms; next up some Anglo-Saxon-style great halls, perhaps? :D

When I was doing research on this subject, I saw a lot of buildings with sod on the roofs. Has anyone else seen this?

The Iron age went on for a fair amount of time - several centuries, and started and ended at different times on different continents. It lasted right up to the Roman invasion in the UK, but I think it might have ended before that in Europe. During that time there were as many developmental advances as we've seen in more recent times - pottery, weapons, farming implements - all kinds of social evolutions and new religions. Building styles also evolved - long houses, and more complicated structures appeared.

Building materials seem to have depended largely on what was available in the local area, and yes, I've seen images of roundhouses built entirely of sods - walls as well.

One website I visited claimed that a roundhouse was only ever intended to last for 30-40 years and then demolished. For some reason thatched roofing was usually burnt at this point, and the land ploughed back to farmland instead of being built on again. Maybe that had something to do with the average lifespan (35-40 years) and some superstition about spirits? Who knows. Any reusable poles and wooden supports were recycled into new buildings though, so they were at least partially practical about the whole thing ;)

I think the sod roundhouses I saw in passing were usually built in places like the Russian Steppe (the Ukraine) where there simply wasn't enough of anything else to build lots of small settlements.

Fire was a very common end to a roundhouse (er... no surprise there with cinders floating up into the thatch I'd say!), and its from these burnt down roundhouses that most of the archaeological evidence has been gleaned. Maybe roofing with sods was just safer?

Sods are used as roofing even today in the far northern islands of Scotland, where people sometimes choose to follow the ancient (virtually stone age) practice of 'crofting'. Its a sort of self sufficiency farming system.

Some houses, like Viking Long hOuses and others, roofs resembled the bottom of a boat. Like the boat had been turned upside down and the people lived under it.

Hide and wood long houses in the US were used by Native Americans in the eastern woodlands, particularly the north east. Lower latitudes, the long houses had sides that could be rolled up to provide air flow.

Not sure how to represent some of that in an overhead view.

@Storm - I think the shading is down to the fact that Scott has already created map files for his buildings ;)

Posted By: Wyvern

JimP mentioned that:Some houses, like Viking Long hOuses and others, roofs resembled the bottom of a boat. Like the boat had been turned upside down and the people lived under it.

Not just Vikings, Jim, although the practice may have derived from them, or merely from practical necessity (lack of other materials), as I well recall the upturned boats reused as sheds from visits to Lindisfarne off the Northumberland coast in NE England back to when I was still very young. Not quite houses, but they are still there - though until checking now, I'd never really thought of them as being quite so interesting or unique in Britain as some online commentators have suggested!

Understood. My amateur history info is more 20th century and part of the Roman Empire. Most of my other history books are about informaiton scattered across the millenia. Now, if I could just win the lotto, got to buy a ticket first, I could build up a reference library of history books.