This makes all the documentary sources and archaeological cases I have seen entirely consistent with one another. The cubicles were ' long and ' deep, with ceilings ' high and bottoms raised 1' above the earthen floor of the compartment.
Few of these dimensions make sense if a two-dimensional platform is envisaged. We know from various sources that the Indians kept firewood under the cubicles and household belongings on top of them. The cubicles did not abut one another end to end because they were shorter than the distances between the fires that warmed them. Thus there were open spaces between the cubicle ends and the partition walls separating compartments, and in these were located storage casks and perhaps other items.
Highly detailed archaeological research on an undisturbed site is needed to determine where cubicles were located within compartments and what other uses and activities went on in the spaces between cubicles occupying the same side of a longhouse.
Lafitau and his translator distinguish very usefully between the "lobby", which is an extension of the longhouse beyond the end compartment [used] for storage, and the "vestibule," which is a flat-roofed porch extending beyond the lobby. The lobbies were apparently less heavily built than the main compartments, and served as storage areas, particularly in the winter.
The vestibules were still more flimsy, and had light walls that could be removed in summer. The progressively less substantial nature of the structures at the ends of the longhouses explains why archaeologists typically have trouble defining them.
They shew'd us where to lay our baggage and repose ourselves during our stay with them, which was in the two end apartments of this large house. The Indians that came with us were placed over against us. This cabin is about 80 feet long and 17 broad, the common passage 6 feet wide; and the apartments on each side 5 feet, raised a foot above the passage by a long sapling hewed square and fitted with joists that go from it to the back of the house. On these joists they lay large pieces of bark, and on extraordinary occasions spread matts made of rushes; this favour we had.
On these floors they set or lye down every one as he will. The apartments are divided from each other by boards or bark, 6 or 7 foot long, from the lower floor to the upper, on which they put their lumber.
When they have eaten their homony, as they set in each apartment before the fire, they can put the bowel over head, having not above 5 foot to reach. They set on the floor sometimes at each end, but mostly at one.
They have a shed to put their wood into in the winter, or in the summer to get to converse or play, that has a door to the south. All the sides of the roof of the cabin is made of bark, bound fast to poles set in the ground and bent round on the top or set aflat for the roof, as we set our rafters.
Over each fire place they leave a hole to let out the smoak, which in rainy weather they cover with a piece of bark, and this they can easily reach with a pole to push it on one side or quite over the hole.
After this model are most of their cabins built. The river that divides this charming vale is 2, 3 or 4 foot deep, very full of trees fallen across or drove on heaps by the torrents. The town in its present state is about 2 or 3 miles long, yet the scattered cabins on both sides the water are not above 40 in number; many of them hold 2 families, but all stand single and rarely above 4 or 5 near one another; so that the whole town is a strange mixture of cabins interspersed with great patches of high grass, bushes and shrubs, some of pease, corn and squashes, limestone bottom composed of fossils and sea shells" [Bartram ; cf.
Bartram ]. About noon I heard that the Messenger I had sent from Oswego had missed his Way and did not arrive there. I therefore immediately sent a Messenger from this place to the Chief Town about five miles off to acquaint the Chiefs of that Nation of my coming with a Message from Onas [the Proprietor of Pennsylvania] on behalf of Assaryquoa [the Governor of Virginia].
Weiser's comments clearly identify the house described and illustrated by Bartram as a special "Town House," presumably a structure built and maintained to house visitors. Its deviation from earlier standard longhouse plans is therefore understandable. It was narrower than traditional longhouses, and contained twice as many cubicles than would have been the case for traditional residential longhouses. The form was traditional in many important respects, but this was a guest house for visitors; Onondaga families now lived in dwellings of a much newer style.
Bartram's description is clear in telling us that the Onondaga were living in scattered two-family houses. Each was the structural equivalent of the traditional longhouse compartment, which had a central fire and two families sharing it from facing cubicles. Bartram says that some houses had traditional rounded roofs while others had flat gabled roofs in the European style.
We can conjecture that the houses designed to hold two families also had gabled roofs. This would be consistent with the pan- Iroquoian trend toward small dispersed cabins built along European 1ines in the middle of the eighteenth century. The more traditional longhouse used to lodge visitors was 80' long but only 17' wide.
Both the 6' passage and the 5' 5. The floor and ceiling heights of the cubicles were at about the traditional levels, and partitions were also traditional. Note: Dr. Snow published an article titled, "The Architecture of Iroquois Longhouses," in which he also discusses the references above and many other firsthand descriptions and illustrations of longhouses.
Snow, D. Northeast Anthropology. Number 53, p. Follow these step-by-step instructions on how to build either a scaled or full-size model of an Iroquois Longhouse. A complete list of materials and floor plans are provided, as well as suggestions on how to build a longhouse of your own design. Skip to main content.
The New York State Museum is open to the public. For more information please see: www. Mohawk Iroquois Longhouse. Snow - - - The two preceding translations differ in some important ways, I have compared both with the French transcription that accompanies one of them Champlain , and have found that the translations are accurate or at least not misleading except at one crucial point. SAGARD, originally in French "As soon as I was seen from our town of Quieuindahian, otherwise called Tequeunonkiaye, a place quite well fortified in their fashion, and capable of containing two or three hundred households [mesnages] in the thirty or forty lodges [Cabannes] in it, there arose so great an uproar throughout the town that everybody left the lodges to come and see me, and so I was brought with great enthusiasm right into the lodge of my savage, and since the crowd was very great in it I was forced to get on top of the platform to escape the pressure of the crowd" [Sagard ].
Snow - - - Sagard apparently copied and embellished Champlain's description, which Champlain published after his voyage. BREBEUF, in Le Jeune in Jesuit Relations, originally in French "'Now, in order to testify to you my deep grief and my desire to share in the common misfortune, I have two bins of corn' they held at least one hundred to one hundred and twenty bushels ; I give one of them freely to the whole village"' [JR].
Snow - - - Brebeuf seems confused about longhouse lengths. Jesuit Relations, "On this same day the sorcerer Tonneraouanont, who was beginning to play his pranks in this village, and had undertaken to cure the sick, came towards evening to have a sweat in our cabin, to get some knowledge of this disease. Jesuit Relations, "In each cabin there are five fireplaces, and two families at each.
Jesuit Relations, "Some of us are charged with forty cabins, --in several of which there are four or five fires, that is, eight or ten families Jesuit Relations, "In these five missions there are thirty-two hamlets, and straggling villages, which comprise in all about seven hundred cabins, about two thousand fires, and about twelve thousand persons.
BRESSANI, Jesuit Relations originally in Italian "The latter [Huron] build enclosed towns, or fortified strongholds, with crossed stakes, traversed with trunks of trees, to protect themselves from attacks of enemies; and make their cabins 10, 15, 20, 30, or 40 cannes in length, of great pieces of bark supported by beams, which serve to hold up their corn, to dry it in winter.
Snow - - - Lafitau depends upon earlier sources, but organizes and expands upon the information. BARTRAM, copied as originally written "We alighted at the council house, where the chiefs were already assembled to receive us, which they did with a grave chearful complaisance, according to their custom.
Snow - - - Weiser's comments clearly identify the house described and illustrated by Bartram as a special "Town House," presumably a structure built and maintained to house visitors. References Cited Bartram, J. Bell, Jr. Imprint Society, Barre, Massachusetts. Sterling, pp. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Barnes and Noble. New York. Edited by H. The Champlain Society, Toronto. Edited by R. Thwaites, Pageant, New York. Lafiteau, J.
Edited by W. Fenton and E. Publications of The Champlain Society 49, Toronto. Sagard-Theodat, G. Sagard's Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons Edited by G. Greenwood Press. Weiser, C. Iroquois Longhouse. Palisade Surrounding the Longhouse. Some longhouses had flat ends. A flat-roofed shed or porch was built over the doorways at both ends of the longhouse.
The length and interior space of the longhouse was divided up into compartments or apartments, which were 20 feet long. Two families lived in each compartment, one on each side of an aisle that ran down the center. The aisle extended from one compartment to the next and ran the full length of the longhouse. The aisle was 10 feet wide and was a common space used by both families in the compartment. Figure 3. Interior of a longhouse. A fire was placed in the middle of the aisle in the center of each compartment for heating, cooking, and light.
Smoke escaped from a hole left in the roof above it. A sheet of bark could be adjusted to cover the smoke hole in bad weather. When the smoke hole was closed, the high ceiling in the building allowed some of the smoke to rise above the living space.
The two families shared the fire and the central aisle. Each family had its own space on one side of the aisle for sleeping and storage of personal items.
In the family space, a platform was built a foot or so above the floor to form a bench where they sat, slept and worked. It extended for most of the compartment's length. The platform bench was closed at the ends by partitions. Storage closets filled the spaces along the wall that were not occupied by the benches.
Another platform of the same size was built about five feet above the bench like a bunk bed. This shelf completed a cubicle, which was heated by the fire that was in the aisle. The inside of the wall was lined and insulated with woven mats or furs.
The benches were also covered with mats and furs for comfort. The space under the bench generally was used to store firewood. The shelf above it was used to store clothes and other items. Braids of corn and sacks of other foods were hung in the high ceiling space. Other household goods were hung on the walls and partitions. The forests where the Iroquois lived provided them with plenty of posts, poles and bark that were the basic components of longhouse structure. Because the trunks of the large trees of a virgin forest are much too large to handle without machinery, the Iroquois harvested their materials from second growth forest.
Such forests arise in clearings in the old growth forests where the trees were killed by fire or by girdling their trunks. Here small trees grow close together with tall straight trunks that can be fashioned into framework components by merely cutting them to length.
The large trees in the adjacent old growth forest could provide bark in large sheets, to be used for covering the structure. Figure 4. Sketch showing a few parts of the framework.
One end shows the bark covering and the external framework that holds the bark sheets down against the wind. The framework of the longhouse started with rows of posts that were set into holes dug into the ground. The posts were set vertically and formed the frames for the outside walls.
There were interior posts as well that formed the center aisle. All posts had to be strong and stiff and set firmly in the ground because they were the foundation of the building. Horizontal poles lashed to the posts, both across and along the length of the longhouse, greatly strengthened the structure.
The roof was supported by poles that were attached at the tops of the posts and were bent into an arch that reached from one wall across the building to the opposite wall. In some instances, longhouses could be much larger; for example, in —72, a longhouse uncovered at the Moyer archaeological site in Southern Ontario was 93 m long.
However, longhouses described by early French explorers and Jesuit missionaries were somewhat shorter. Historical sources provide various measurements for longhouses and suggest that the size and shape changed over time. Men constructed longhouses by driving stiff wall posts made of wood into the ground.
Flexible wooden poles were then attached to the top of those posts and bent to form roof supports. Lashed together with natural materials, such as long strips of bark or with ropes made of bark, these horizontal poles strengthened the frame.
Wooden sheathing covered the structure. In Huron-Wendat homes, this sheathing was made of cedar bark; in Haudenosaunee homes, it was elm bark. Sleeping platforms ran the length of the house. The number of hearths depended on the number of families in the home. Often, there were about 4 to 12 hearths in a longhouse. The hearths were spaced about 6 to 13 m apart, running down the middle of the structure.
They were often shared by two nuclear families of five or six persons. Vents in the ceiling prevented the smoke from the hearths from billowing inside the home. Entrances to the longhouse were often covered with hide. A primary use of the longhouse was to serve as a place of residence.
An Iroquois longhouse is just what it sounds like, a long house, built of thin bendable wood, with branches woven in and out of the joists. On the outside, people used slabs of birch bark to make a waterproof covering.
Birchbark was readily available all over the forest floor. So wood was the most appropriate choice for the Iroquois. Other people who lived in longhouses include the Chinook , the Guarani , and early medieval British people.
Longhouses were big enough so that a lot of people could live in one longhouse. Usually you lived with not just your mom and dad and brothers and sisters, but also with your cousins and aunts, and your grandparents.
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