The First Log Buildings?

According to convention, log construction was introduced to America by Scandinavian and German immigrants, who settled in the Middle Colonies after 1638. Tracing the European log house's history is a more arduous task. The question, "Who built the first log structure?" may be unanswerable. The Roman architect Vitruvius (ca. 75 – ca. 15 BC), in the second book of his Ten Books on Architecture (or De Architectura), describes the log dwellings erected by the inhabitants of Colchis, a region lying between the Black Sea and Caucasus Mountains, in present western Georgia:

The woods of the Colchi, in Pontus, furnish such abundance of timber, that they build in the following manner. Two trees are laid level on the earth, right and left, at such distance from each other as will suit the length of the trees which are to cross and connect them. On the extreme ends of these two trees are laid two other trees transversely: the space which the house will inclose is thus marked out. The four sides being thus set out, towers are raised, whose walls consist of trees laid horizontally but kept perpendicularly over each other, the alternate layers yoking the angles. The level interstices which the thickness of the trees alternately leave, is filled in with chips and mud. (1)

Were it not for his use of "Colchi" and "Pontus," Vitruvius could be detailing a standard American log house (or cabin). (Whether the Colchians — like their Western inheritors — notched or hewed the timbers they used, I can't say.) Vitruvius continues:

On a similar principle they form their roofs, except that gradually reducing the length of the trees which traverse from angle to angle, they assume a pyramidal form. They are covered with boughs and smeared over with clay; and thus after a rude fashion of vaulting, their quadrilateral roofs are formed.

Here, the Colchian method of construction diverges from later European techniques. That the Colchians could erect such roofs suggests that they treated (that is, notched or shaped) their logs. I'm scarcely an engineer, but a pyramid of round trunks, I suspect, would risk collapse.

Did log architecture truly originate in the Caucasus? Perhaps; perhaps not. Few written accounts of pre-Christian European building techniques exist, and archaeological evidence for log construction is, for obvious reasons, scanty. In any case, the Germanic tribes of northern and northeastern Europe (by the early modern period, the log house's locus) did not, during the Roman era, employ such methods. In Germania, Tacitus (ca. 56 – ca. 117) writes:

With [the Germans] in truth, is unknown even the use of mortar and of tiles. In all their structures they employ materials quite gross and unhewn, void of fashion and comeliness. Some parts they besmear with an earth so pure and resplendent, that it resembles painting and colours. They are likewise wont to scoop caves deep in the ground, and over them to lay great heaps of dung. Thither they retire for shelter in the winter, and thither convey their grain: for by such close places they mollify the rigorous and excessive cold. (2)

The Germans, then, occupied mud huts or earth-roofed cellars (Tacitus surely uses "dung" only to deride). No doubt, these buildings contained wood (if only for a roof framework), but I can't imagine they used stacked logs. In the valley of the Danube, such subterranean habitations survived into the 1880s.

I searched for a corroborating account of Colchis's log homes, but found only one (possible) reference. Strabo's Geographica, written in the first or second decade BC, mentions the abodes of the "Heptacometae," who resided just north of Colchis:

Now all these peoples who live in the mountains are utterly savage, but the Heptacometae are worse than the rest. Some also live in trees or turrets; and it was on this account that the ancients called them 'Mosynoeci,' the turrets being called 'mosyni.' (3)

Though "live in trees" may mean "live in dwellings constructed of trees," Strabo, more likely, describes simple tree houses. In the succeeding sentence, he writes, "They . . . attack wayfarers, leaping down upon them from their scaffolds."

1) From Joseph Gwilt's translation (1826); transcribed by Bill Thayer, and posted on his excellent website.
2) From Thomas Gordon's translation (1910); reproduced by Fordham University.
3) From H.L. Jones's translation (1917–1932); transcribed by Bill Thayer.