![]() Numerous silo-caves have been abandoned and backfilled, or left for collapse. Over recent years, with improvement in the local living conditions, folks move from the underground to the ground. There were a large number of traditional silo-cave villages with typical regional characteristics in this area. Before the 1980s, silo-caves were basically the only housing type for the people living in the loess plateau area. Similar to the valued historical architectures in other countries, silo-caves are confronted with various challenges during the process of modernization, globalization and urbanization, including commercialization, developmental destruction, and constructional destruction. The silo-cave, a representative of traditional villages with local characteristics, witnesses and preserves occurrence, development, and evolution of the agricultural civilization through thousands of years, and thus is considered highly valuable in history, architecture, sociology, geology, and art. Known as “the historic village below the horizon and living fossil for the history of dwellings”, it is the last surviving earth architecture constructed in accordance with the Rule of Subtraction, which is the opposition of the addition of material in building up architecture above ground, and thus it is considered a wonder of the human history of dwellings. It features a dwelling unit built by excavating the ground down to create a courtyard and then caving on the four walls of the courtyard (Fig. ![]() What drew attention to this research is the traditional village of the silo-caves, a unique dwelling form of human beings, located in the Loess Plateau of North China. ![]() They carry important signatures of human civilization over thousands of years in their historical archive and cultural landscapes. ![]() Traditional villages in China typically refer to those villages with long history, rich cultural and natural resources, and well-retained traditional lifestyle. Sustainable development of these traditional silo-cave villages relies on administrative policy and planning, people’s awareness of cultural heritage protection, culture inheritance, industrial transformation, and public services. These patterns are demonstrated to be influenced by many factors, including landforms, traffic conditions, economic development, population growth, and administrative division adjustment. The morphological evolution patterns of typical silo-cave villages are identified, including: (1) retaining the periphery and rebuilding the inner parts of the villages, (2) retaining the inner parts and expanding the periphery of the villages, and (3) rebuilding the inner parts and expanding the periphery of the villages. The research shows that silo-cave villages are mainly distributed in economically underdeveloped areas, such as West Henan (Yuxi), South Shanxi (Jinnan), Central Shaanxi (Guanzhong), and East Gansu (Longdong). In this paper, remote sensing and GIS techniques are used to comprehensively and systematically investigate the spatial distributions and morphological characteristics of silo-caves at both the macro and micro scales. This architecture has had a history of more than 7000 years, and yet such “living fossils for the history of dwellings” are now facing great crises and challenges during rapid social and economic development. Silo-cave is a unique human habitation form on the Loess Plateau in northern China, which consists of an excavated 6–7 m deep pit as the courtyard and cave dwellings in the surrounding four walls.
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