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Longhouses A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. It has been built in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe, and North America. Many were built from timber and often re ...
were a style of residential dwelling built by Native American First Nation peoples in various parts of
North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and th ...
. Sometimes separate longhouses were built for community meetings.


Iroquois and the other East Coast longhouses

The Iroquois (
Haudenosaunee The Iroquois ( or ), officially the Haudenosaunee ( meaning "people of the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian Peoples, Iroquoian-speaking Confederation#Indigenous confederations in North America, confederacy of First Nations in Canada, First Natio ...
or "People of the Longhouses") who resided in the Northeastern United States as well as Eastern Canada (
Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...
and
Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirte ...
) built and inhabited longhouses. These were sometimes more than in length but generally around wide. Scholars believe walls were made of sharpened and fire-hardened poles (up to 1,000 saplings for a house) driven close together into the ground. Strips of bark were woven horizontally through the lines of poles to form more or less weatherproof walls. Poles were set in the ground and braced by horizontal poles along the walls. The roof is made by bending a series of poles, resulting in an arc-shaped roof. This was covered with leaves and grasses. The frame is covered by bark that is sewn in place and layered as shingles, and reinforced by light swag. Doors were constructed at both ends and were covered with an animal hide to preserve interior warmth. Especially long longhouses had doors in the sidewalls as well. Longhouses featured fireplaces in the center for warmth. Holes were made above the hearth to let out smoke, but such smoke holes also let in rain and snow. Ventilation openings, later singly dubbed as a smoke pipe, were positioned at intervals, possibly totalling five to six along the roofing of the longhouse. Missionaries who visited these longhouses often wrote about their dark interiors. On average a typical longhouse was about and was meant to house up to twenty or more families, most of whom were matrilineally related. The people had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance passed through the maternal line. Children were born into the mother's clan. Protective palisades were built around the dwellings; these stood high, keeping the longhouse village safe. Tribes or ethnic groups in northeast North America, south and east of Lake Ontario and
Lake Erie Lake Erie ( "eerie") is the fourth largest lake by surface area of the five Great Lakes in North America and the eleventh-largest globally. It is the southernmost, shallowest, and smallest by volume of the Great Lakes and therefore also ha ...
, which had traditions of building longhouses include the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee): Seneca,
Cayuga Cayuga often refers to: * Cayuga people, a native tribe to North America, part of the Iroquois Confederacy * Cayuga language, the language of the Cayuga Cayuga may also refer to: Places Canada * Cayuga, Ontario United States * Cayuga, Illinoi ...
, Onondaga,
Oneida Oneida may refer to: Native American/First Nations * Oneida people, a Native American/First Nations people and one of the five founding nations of the Iroquois Confederacy * Oneida language * Oneida Indian Nation, based in New York * Oneida ...
and Mohawk. The
Iroquoian The Iroquoian languages are a language family of indigenous peoples of North America. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages are polysynthetic and head-marking. As of 2020, all surviving Iroquoia ...
Wyandot (also called Huron) and Erie also built longhouses, as did the Algonquian Lenni Lenape, who lived from western New England in Connecticut, along the lower
Hudson River The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between Ne ...
, and along the Delaware River and both sides of the Delaware Bay. The Pamunkey of the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan Confederacy in
Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are ...
also built longhouses. Although the Shawnee were not known to build longhouses, colonist Christopher Gist describes how, during his visit to Lower Shawneetown in January 1751, he and Andrew Montour addressed a meeting of village leaders in a "Kind of State-House of about 90 Feet long, with a light Cover of Bark in which they hold their Councils."


Northwest Coast longhouses

The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America also built a form of longhouse. Theirs were built with logs or split-log frame, and covered with split log planks, and sometimes an additional bark cover. Cedar is the preferred lumber. The wealthy built extraordinarily large longhouses. The Suquamish Old Man House, at what became the Port Madison Squamish Reservation, was , c. 1850.Suttle & Lane (1990), p. 491Old Man House is occasionally found (incorrectly or from Chinook Jargon) as Ole Man House or Oleman House. Usually one doorway faces the shore. Each longhouse contains a number of booths along both sides of the central hallway, separated by wooden containers (akin to modern drawers). Each booth has its own individual hearth and fire. Usually an extended family occupied one longhouse, and cooperated in obtaining food, building canoes, and other daily tasks. The gambrel roof was unique to
Puget Sound Puget Sound ( ) is a sound of the Pacific Northwest, an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, and part of the Salish Sea. It is located along the northwestern coast of the U.S. state of Washington. It is a complex estuarine system of interconnected m ...
Coast Salish. The front is often very elaborately decorated with an integrated mural of numerous drawings of faces and heraldic crest icons of raven, bear, whale, etc. A totem pole often was erected outside the longhouse. The style varies greatly, and sometimes it became part of the entrance way. Tribes or ethnic groups along the North American Pacific coast with some sort of longhouse building traditions include the
Haida Haida may refer to: Places * Haida, an old name for Nový Bor * Haida Gwaii, meaning "Islands of the People", formerly called the Queen Charlotte Islands * Haida Islands, a different archipelago near Bella Bella, British Columbia Ships * , a ...
, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Makah, Clatsop, Coast Salish and Multnomah.


Excavations at Ozette, Washington

From beneath mud flows dating back to about 1700, archaeologists have recovered timbers and planks. In the part of one house where a woodworker lived, tools were found and also tools in all stages of manufacture. There were even wood chips. Where a whaler lived, there lay harpoons and also a wall screen carved with a whale. Benches and looms were inlaid with shell, and there were other indications of wealth. A single house had five separate living areas centered on cooking hearths; each had artifacts that revealed aspects of the former occupants' lives. More bows and arrows were found at one living area than any of the others, an indication that hunters lived there. Another had more fishing gear than other subsistence equipment, and at another, more harpoon equipment. Some had everyday work gear, and few elaborately ornamented things. The whaler's corner was just the opposite. The houses were built so that planks on the walls and roofs could be taken off and used at other places, as the people moved seasonally. Paired uprights supported rafters, which, in turn, held roof planks that overlapped like tiles. Wall planks were lashed between sets of poles. The position of these poles depended on the lengths of the boards they held, and they were evidently set and reset through the years the houses were occupied. Walls met at the corners by simply butting together. They stayed structurally independent, allowing for easy dismantling. There were no windows. Light and ventilation came by shifting the position of roof planks, which were simply weighted with rocks, not fastened in position. Benches raised above the floor on stakes provided the main furniture of the houses. They were set near the walls. Cuts and puncture marks indicated they served as work platforms; mats rolled out onto them tie with elders' memories of such benches used as beds. Storage was concentrated behind the benches, along the walls and in corners between benches. These locations within the houses have yielded the most artifacts. The rafters must have also provided storage, but the mudflow carried away this part of the houses.


Bibliography

* Cappel, Constance. ''The Smallpox Genocide of the Odawa Tribe at L'Arbre Croche, 1763: The History of a Native American People,'' The Edwin Mellon Press, 2007. *


See also

* Dorset culture * Ganondagan State Historic Site * Igloo * List of dwellings of Pueblo peoples *
Ozette Indian Village Archeological Site The Ozette Native American Village Archeological Site is the site of an archaeological excavation on the Olympic Peninsula near Neah Bay, Washington, United States. The site was a village occupied by the Ozette Makah people until a mudslide inund ...
* Plank house * Quiggly hole * Wigwam/Wickiup * Tipi


References


External links

*Virtual Museum of Canada
The St. Lawrence Iroquoians
— Virtual exhibit that includes information on Iroquoian longhouse layout and architecture


Further reading

* http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/IroquoisVillage/constructionone.html {{DEFAULTSORT:Longhouses of the indigenous peoples of North America Traditional Native American dwellings Canadian architectural styles Iroquois Haida Tsimshian Tlingit Makah Coast Salish de:Langhaus (Wohngebäude)#Langhäuser der Indianer in Amerika