It matters where you build your house. (See Matthew 7:24.) Consider these wild home locations chosen by people through history.

Would you build your house . . .

. . . in a cliff? In the 1100s, Ancestral Puebloans got busy building homes in the cliffs of Colorado. They used blocks about the size of bread loaves to construct thick stone buildings up to three stories high. Some walls in their villages are stained with smoke. That shows the Pueblos survived freezing winters by building fires. The high-up villages demonstrate courage and cleverness. Their hard-to-get-to homes protected them from enemies. Archaeologists wonder: For Puebloans, was learning to scale the side of a cliff a normal part of growing up?

. . . below sea level? Dutch people have a lot of water to deal with. Much of their land lies along the coastline of the North Sea. They also have three big rivers. When people arrived in the now-Netherlands, they built villages on mounds of land to protect from floods. They constructed dikes (long walls) to keep water out. Canals and pumps drained the land. Windmills pumped water off soil. That’s a lot of work and time spent just to stay dry! An old joke goes like this: “While God created the Earth, the Dutch created the Netherlands.”

. . . in a tree? The Korowai people live deep in the forests in West Papua, Indonesia. They eat caterpillars, fish, and parts of the sago tree. They live in sago trees too. Did you ever dream of living in a tree house? Sadly, the Korowai tree homes aren’t built for fun. They’re built because of fear. The tribe believes evil spirits live low to the ground. Many Korowai have never left West Papua. They may not even know that other people exist!