Late prehistoric and early historic period Cherokee villages typically included winter or hot houses, summer houses, large community buildings such as town or council houses, and numerous smaller structures for religious, healing, storage, and agricultural purposes. Most were built with vertically placed wood posts, as archaeological excavations show. Winter houses provided living space during the coldest months and were typically round, square with rounded corners, or, in the early historic period, octagonal. Built with wattle and daub construction, their exterior walls used upright posts interwoven with split rivercanes or small saplings. Interior floors were usually excavated from 1 foot to 1.5 feet below the surrounding ground, and the clayey soil removed was mixed with chopped grasses and water to make daub for thickly plastering the wall wattles, while remaining dirt was piled against the exterior to form a sloping backfill berm. Inside, four large central roof support posts usually surrounded a central hearth that provided heat, cooking fire, and light. Roofs were typically covered with tree bark or grass thatching, and recent research indicates that interior rafters and roof covering may also have been smeared with daub as a fire retardant. Sleeping benches, often covered with woven rivercane mats and animal hides, lined the walls. Entry was through a low, narrow corridor extending through the backfill berm. To keep out excess moisture and retain heat, winter houses had no windows or smoke holes, so light came solely from the hearth fire. Both winter and summer houses were probably also used for storage during the off season. William Bartram wrote in 1792 that these houses were built of a wooden frame lathed and plastered inside and out with reddish mortar, giving them the appearance of red brick walls, and roofed with cypress bark or shingles. In 1775, James Adair described deep-set forked posts about five or six feet above the ground, thick woven saplings daubed about six or seven inches with tough clay mixed with withered grass, long dry grass thatching, a narrow winding entrance passage six or seven feet long, and a floor often a yard lower than the earth. In 1757, William DeBrahm described a winter house at Chota on the Little Tennessee River in east Tennessee as about 30 feet in diameter and 15 feet high, cone-shaped, built with poles and thatched, without any air hole except a small door about 3 feet high and 18 inches wide, with a central fire and bedsteads fixed around the inside, where families stayed during winter nights. At the Warren Wilson site in Buncombe County, more than a dozen houses are arranged in a circular pattern around an open plaza and surrounded by a palisade of vertical posts, and these somewhat circular to square houses with rounded corners closely match early ethnographic descriptions. At the Ravensford site, the location of the Cherokee comprehensive school, an octagonal house was excavated along with a rectangular summer house in much the same configuration.