Korowai People - Architecture

Architecture

The distinctive high stilt architecture of the Korowai houses, well above flood-water levels, is a form of defensive fortification- to disrupt rival clans from capturing people (especially women and children) for slavery or cannibalism. The height and girth of the common ironwood stilts also serves to protect the house from arson attacks in which huts are set alight and the inhabitants smoked out.

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