Walls is a favorite subject of mine. The first proto-towns of (mostly) celtic Northern Europe were the oppida (sing. oppidum, latin 'enclosed space') of the first millennia. These were walled villages, almost always on hills, plateaus or islands overlooking trade routes. 
One of the largest oppidum was Manching in what is now southern Germany. It covered 380 hectares, had 7.2km of walls and between 5k and 10k people. It had artisans as well as ample space for agriculture. Unusually it was built on a plain and lasted from 300 B.C. to 30-50 B.C.
The walls enclosing these Celtic villages were called "murus gallicus" by Julius Caesar. They were built with a wonderfully clever and simple wooden framework, faced with stone and filled with tamped dirt. The piles were laid in a cross pattern and secured with large iron nails.
The combination of stone, earth and timber made them cheap and invincible to fire and battering rams. In The Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar describes how they were built. His way of defeating them in the famous siege of Avaricum was to build a massive ramp to match the walls.
Incidentally, the method of construction used in the celtic town walls is similar to the vernacular way of building earthquake proof houses in the Himalayas, taq and dhajji dewari style construction of timber interlacing the stone walls. Battering rams and earthquakes: similar.
Even if you aren't going to build a defensive town wall (not yet) around your village, the principle of the murus gallicus can be replicated in the simple cordwood wall. With or without a timber frame structure. A cheap and simple way of building incredibly strong structures.
Or, if you are building on a flood plain, and really need to elevate your house but can't afford it, a murus gallicus construction is a great way to achieve it. But you better have lots of friends willing to help out, and it might be a good idea to use some of the logs as poles.
A common variant of the murus gallicus is the very similar —and also celtic—Pfostenschlitzmauer (post-slot-wall), where you build the wall inside a timber frame, it uses less wood but with similar strength.
If you are into forts and military history you will enjoy Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's famous 1872 "Histoire d'une forteresse" (Annals of a Fortress in English, free) which is the account of an imaginary fortress and its stormings, from ancient pre-history to the war of 1870.
