Australia Austronesia with capped house posts are believed to be derived from the designs of traditional
granaries Chamorro buildings raised on capped stone pillars called
haligi Building structures on pilings is believed to be derived from the design of raised rice
granaries and storehouses, which are highly important status symbols among the ancestrally rice-cultivating Austronesians. Indirect evidence of traditional Austronesian architecture, however, can be gleaned from their contemporary representations in art, like in
friezes on the walls of later
Hindu-Buddhist stone temples (like in reliefs in
Borobudur and
Prambanan). But these are limited to the recent centuries. They can also be reconstructed linguistically from shared terms for architectural elements, like ridge-poles, thatch, rafters, house posts, hearth, notched log ladders, storage racks, public buildings, and so on. Linguistic evidence also makes it clear that stilt houses were already present among Austronesian groups since at least the
Late Neolithic. Waterson (2009) has also argued that the architectural tradition of stilt houses in eastern Asia and the Pacific is originally Austronesian, and that similar building traditions in Japan and mainland Asia (notably among
Kra-Dai and
Austroasiatic-speaking groups) correspond to contacts with a prehistoric Austronesian network.
South Asia In South Asia, stilt houses are very common in
Northeast India, specifically the
Brahmaputra Valley regions of
Assam, which is extremely prone to regional flooding from the Brahmaputra. These houses are known as
chang ghar in
Assamese, and as
kare okum in
Mising; chang ghar are traditionally built by the
Mising people, who live along the Brahmaputra. Unlike many forms of traditional architecture, including stilt architecture, in South and Southeast Asia, the construction of chang ghar is making a resurgence and increasing in popularity, as a result of climate change increasing regular flooding in Assam, and the stilts of the chang ghar is adapted to flooding in the first place. The height of the stilts of the chang ghar is determined by the height of the water during the last major flood. Stilt houses are also popular in
Kerala in the
Kerala backwaters, another regions with high rainfall and regular flooding from monsoons. Although stilt houses in the Kerala Backwaters have been a traditional method of house construction for many years, following the disastrous
2018 floods in Kerala, many more stilt houses have been constructed recently and utilize concrete as well as timber for their pillars. == Europe ==