3 Native Winter Shelters. Only One Held 35°F With NO Fire

Bank snow up the sides of a wigwam, let the fire go out, and the inside sits at whatever the woods outside are doing. Keene State College logged exactly that, on loggers running inside and out. So what was happening in that Utah pit house, sitting at 35 degrees on a night that hit 4 below, with nothing burning in it at all? Three indigenous North American winter shelters have been rebuilt in the modern era with instruments running inside them, and all three published their numbers. This video runs the same question on each one. With no fire, a room settles at a blend of the outdoor air and whatever its walls and floor are touching. The snow-banked wigwam touches air. The bark longhouse touches air and pays the difference in firewood, 436 kilograms of it in 30 hours at Ska-Nah-Doht in January 1979. The Fremont pit house touches dirt, and it came in at 35 degrees Fahrenheit against 4 below outside, with no heat source of any kind. Sources include the Keene State wigwam study, Matthew Sturm's snow conductivity measurements from the Beaufort Sea, Samuel de Champlain's 1615 account of Wendat longhouse interiors, the Williamson occupancy experiment at Ska-Nah-Doht, the ASHRAE human heat output tables, and Ken Carpenter and Timothy Riley's pit house replica at the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah.