Read my comment. I literally quoted half of what you're telling me to read. That's what I'm critiquing.
And you might not have time to bring your family out to the surrounding forests. If these were centrally located in town, they might have been intended just for the people who happened to be in town at the moment.
I'm not saying that I know what they were for. Just that the reasons the article gives for saying they weren't for hiding don't hold up at all.
The ones I'm aware of aren't in the middle of town, and by definition they can't be because they're holes in the soil landscape which is in short supply in the centre of a town. They're near small villages for which getting your family into hiding can be as simple as walking across the road into forests, ravines, etc. It'd actually be much easier to just herd your family into some nearby patch of wilderness than to shove them all into a hole in the ground without food, water, or toilet facilities.
In any case hostile forces don't just teleport into your village, they're moving on foot and stopping to loot on the way, you've usually got weeks of warning that something bad is happening and days of warning that it's about to happen to you. The whole shelter theory just doesn't hold water.
And you might not have time to bring your family out to the surrounding forests. If these were centrally located in town, they might have been intended just for the people who happened to be in town at the moment.
I'm not saying that I know what they were for. Just that the reasons the article gives for saying they weren't for hiding don't hold up at all.