The pictures are lovely, Steve. Actually, i think the fella in the bottom picture is sun-bathing; he isn't dead at all. If he were dead, i believe it was your pumpkin pie that did it.

I love the sketches, Steve... very nice.

Yes, I agree with M....Hope that you post the finished products as well.

The question round vs. square has been bugging me so I dug around a bit and found this interesting tidbit from Sheffield University

Living in a roundhouse - more than bread alone

The decision to adopt roundhouse architecture seems to have been rather more involved than, say, deciding to build a bungalow today. Houses were built to very specific arrangements and there were strong social rules about how people behaved in them. Where the cooking, working and sleeping areas were arranged was fixed for everyone, not just at Cladh Hallan but throughout Britain and Ireland during the first millennium BC. On the Continent prehistoric architecture was rectangular but the inhabitants of Britain built roundhouses, having previously built circular monuments in wood and stone. Many of those earlier monuments in the preceeding periods of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age seem to have been linked to the sun and its movements.

For some time, archaeologists have suspected that roundhouse architecture was not simply functional but embodied religious beliefs about the world and about the cyclical passage of time. The organisation of space within the Cladh Hallan roundhouses has confirmed this hunch. Throughout Britain and Ireland, most roundhouses face east or southeast, away from the prevailing westerly winds and also towards the rising sun. The interior layout is surprisingly uniform, from the English south coast to the Hebrides and Orkney.

In these east-facing houses the passage of the sun around the sky is echoed in the siting of activities around the house. Daytime tasks of cooking and working were carried out exclusively on the south side - when the sun was high in the sky - whilst the sleeping area (a large, low platform of springy machair turf on which everyone slept together) was on the north side where the sun disappears below the horizon. More specifically, the cooking area is located in the southeast, associated with the start of the day. Even though the house interiors were dark and windowless, the daytime domestic chores were carried out indoors and not outside the entrance.

It was not only this sunwise daily cycle that was built into the house but also the cycle of life, from birth to death. The underfloor burials of humans and dogs were made in the northeast quadrants as were the 'closing' offerings of bronze artefacts. The only exception to this was the burial of the woman in the north house but this may reflect the special association with death that this house seems to have had. There is even evidence, from lines of stones placed on the floor, that people entering the houses were directed to move in a sunwise direction inside them.

All of the houses at Cladh Hallan faced east except for one small building (under the south roundhouse) which faced west. This did not have a fireplace and must have been cold and drafty. There are a few other roundhouses in the Western Isles, mostly of later dates (c. 200 BC - AD 400), which also had west-facing doorways. One of these is on top of a hill at Clettraval on North Uist, built into the back of a prehistoric tomb, and it must have been exceptionally uncomfortable! Where evidence survives, these houses facing the wrong way still abided by the same arrangement of interior activities in relation to the position of the doorway. Why they were arranged to face the opposite direction to everyone else we do not know. One theory is that they were the houses of druids, who performed their work at night.