Longhouse

A Pacific Northwest Coast-style longhouse at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

A longhouse or long house is a type of long, narrow, single-room building built by peoples in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe and North America.

Many were built from timber and often represent the earliest form of permanent structure in many cultures. Types include the Neolithic long house of Europe, the Medieval Dartmoor longhouse and the Native American long house.

Europe

File:Fyrkat hus stor.jpg

A reconstructed Viking Age house.

There are two European longhouse types that are now extinct.

• The Neolithic long house type was introduced with the first farmers of central and western Europe around 5000 B.C.E.—7000 years ago.
• The Germanic cattle farmer longhouses emerged along the southwestern North Sea coast in the third or fourth century B.C.E. and might be the ancestors of several medieval house types such as the Scandinavian langhus, the English, Welsh, and Scottish longhouse variants and the German and Dutch Fachhallenhaus.

The medieval longhouse types of Europe of which some have survived are among others:

• The Scandinavian or Viking Langhus
• The British (Brythonic) variants in Dartmoor and Wales the Tyddyn
• The northwest England type in Cumbria
• The Scottish Longhouse, "Black house" or taighean dubha
• The old Frisian Langhuis that developed into the Frisian farmhouse which probably influenced the development of the Gulf house (German: Gulfhaus), that spread along the North Sea coast to the east and north.
• The French longère or maison longue (with different versions from different origins)

Further developments of the Germanic longhouse during the Middle Ages were the Low German house in the North and especially Northwest Germany and its northern neighbor, the Cimbrian farmhouse in Jutland including Schleswig with its variants: the Geestharden house and Frisian house. With these house types the wooden posts originally rammed into the ground were replaced by posts supported on a base. The large and well-supported attic enabled large quantities of hay or grain to be stored in dry conditions. This development may have been driven because the weather became wetter over time. Good examples of these houses have been preserved, some dating back to the 16th century.

The Americas

In North America two groups of longhouses emerged: the Native American long house of the tribes usually connected with the Iroquois in the northeast, and an unrelated type used by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. The longhouses that were inhabited by the Iroquois was a bark-covered structure which provided shelter for several related families. Each longhouse had a clan symbol placed over the doorway.

A detailed description of the latter is contained in the slave narrative of John R. Jewitt, an Englishman who spent three years as a captive of the Nootka people in 1802-1805.

In South America the Tucano people of Colombia and northwest Brazil traditionally combine a household in a single long house.

Asia

Ancient Mumun pottery period culture

In Daepyeong, an archaeological site of the Mumun pottery period in Korea long houses have been found that date to circa 1100-850 B.C.E. Their layout seems to be similar to those of the Iroquois of America. As in these several fireplaces were arranged along the longitudinal axis of the building. Later the ancient Koreans started raising their buildings on stilts, so that the inner partitions and arrangements are somewhat obscure. The size of the buildings though and their placement within the settlements may point to buildings for the nobles of their society or some sort of community or religious buildings. In Igeum-dong, an excavation site in South Korea, the large longhouses, 29 and 26 meters long, are situated between the megalithic cemetery and the rest of the settlement.

Taiwan

The long house may be an old building tradition among the people of Austronesian origin or intensive contact.^{[citation needed]} The Austronesian language group seems to have spread to south east Asia and the Pacific islands as well as Madagascar from the island of Taiwan. Groups like the Siraya of ancient Taiwan built long houses and practiced head hunting as did for example the later Dayaks of Borneo.

Borneo longhouse

A Modern Iban Longhouse in Kapit Division

Many of the inhabitants of the Southeast Asian island of Borneo (now Kalimantan, Indonesia and States of Sarawak and Sabah, Malaysia), the Dayak, live traditionally in buildings known as a longhouse, Rumah panjang in Malay, rumah panjai in Iban. Common to most of these is that they are built raised off the ground on stilts and are divided into a more or less public area along one side and a row of private living quarters lined along the other side. This seems to have been the way of building best accustomed to life in the jungle in the past, as otherwise hardly related people have come to build their dwellings in similar ways. One may observe similarities to South American jungle villages also living in large single structures. The design is elegant: being raised, flooding presents little inconvenience. The entry could double as a canoe dock. Being raised, cooling air could circulate as well as have the living area above ground where any breeze is more likely. Livestock could shelter underneath the longhouses for greater protection from predators and the elements.

In modern times many of the older longhouses have been replaced with buildings using more modern materials but of similar design. In areas where flooding is not a problem, beneath the longhouse between the stilts, which was traditionally used for a work place for tasks such as threshing, has been converted into living accommodation or has been closed in to provide more security. Also in modern times long houses in Asia were made of grass and tree bark

The layout of a traditional longhouse could be described thus:

A wall runs along the length of the building approximately down the longitudinal axis of the building. The space along one side of the wall serves as a corridor running the length of the building while the other side is blocked from public view by the wall and serves as private areas.

Behind this wall lay the private units, bilik, each with a single door for each family. These are usually divided from each other by walls of their own and contain the living and sleeping spaces. The kitchens, dapor, sometimes reside within this space but are quite often situated in rooms of their own, added to the back of a bilik or even in a building standing a little away from the longhouse and accessed by a small bridge due to the fear of fire, as well as reducing smoke and insects attracted to cooking from gathering in living quarters..

The corridor itself is divided into three parts. The space in front of the door, the tempuan, belongs to each bilik unit and is used privately. This is where rice can be pounded or other domestic work can be done. A public corridor, a ruai, basically used like a village road, runs the whole length in the middle of the open hall. Along the outer wall is the space where guests can sleep, the pantai. On this side a large veranda, a tanju, is built in front of the building where the rice (padi) is dried and other outdoor activities can take place. Under the roof is a sort of attic, the sadau, that runs along the middle of the house under the peak of the roof. Here the padi, other food, and other things can be stored. Sometimes the sadau has a sort of gallery from which the life in the ruai can be observed. The pigs and chicken live underneath the house between the stilts.

The houses built by the different tribes and ethnic groups can differ from each other. Houses described as above may be used by the Iban Sea Dayak and Melanau Sea Dayak. Similar houses are built by the Bidayuh, Land Dayak, however with wider verandas and extra buildings for the unmarried adults and visitors. The buildings of the Kayan, Kenyah, Murut, and Kelabit used to have fewer walls between individual bilik units. The Punan seem to be the last ethnic group that adopted this type of house building. The Rungus of Sabah in north Borneo build a type of longhouse with rather short stilts, the house raised three to five feet of the ground, and walls sloped outwards.

A lot of place names in Sarawak still have the word "Long" in their name and most of these still are or once were longhouses. Some villages like Long Semado in Sarawak even have airfields of their own. Regions with long houses are for example Ulu Anyut and Ulu Paku in Sarawak. Another long house is the Punan sama.

Siberut

An Uma, the traditional communal house of the Mentawai

A traditional house type of the Sakuddei people, on the island of Siberut, part of the Mentawai Islands some 130 kilometers (81 mi) to the west off the coast of Sumatra (Sumatera), Indonesia is also described as a longhouse on stilts. Some five to ten families may live in each, but they are organised differently from those on Borneo inside. From front to back such an "uma" called house regularly consists of an open platform serving as main entrance place followed by a covered gallery. The inside is divided into two rooms, one behind the other. On the back therte is another platform. The whole building is raised on short stilts about half a meter of the ground. The front platform is used for generall activities while the covered gallery is the favorite place for the men where to host guests and the men usually sleep. The following first room is entered by a door and contains a central communal hearth and a place for dancing. There are also places for religious and ritual objects and activities. In the adjoining room the women and their small children as well as unmarried daughters sleep, usually in compartements divided into families. The platform on the back is used by the women for their everyday activities. Visiting women usually enter the house here.

Uma are traditional vernacular houses found on the western part of the island of Siberut in Indonesia. The island is part of the Mentawai islands off the west coast of Sumatra.

The structures are influenced by the Acehnese style, they are built on a much larger scale. They were formerly used as uma longhouses by the Sakuddei tribe before they were forced to abandon their traditional way of life through government intervention in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then, some attempts have been made to re-establish them in their former areas of settlement. Uma longhouses are rectangular with a verandah at each end. They can be 300 sqm in area. Built on piles, they traditional have no windows. The insides are separated into different dwelling spaces by partition which usually have inter-connecting doors.

Villages are built alongside river banks and are made up of one or more communal Uma longhouses and single-storey family houses known as lalep. Villages housed up to 300 people and the larger villages were divided into sections along patrilineal clans of families with their own uma. Rusuk were dwellings for widows and bachelors which are similar to the family longhouse but without an altar. aThe uma is the centre of social, religious, and political life and it is here where every village member of egalitarian Mentawai society is able to contribute meetings about matters affecting the community. Like many Indonesians, Mentawaians believe in a separable soul that leaves the body upon death becoming a ghost. To protect themselves from these spirits, fetish sticks are placed by the entrances of the log wall that surrounds and fortifies the village and forms a stockade for cattle.

Vietnam

A Mnong longhouse in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.

The M'nong and E De of Vietnam also have a tradition of building long houses (Nhà dài) that may be 30 to 40 m long. In contrast to the jungle versions of Borneo these sport shorter stilts and seem to use a veranda in front of a short (gable) side as main entrance.

Nepal

The Tharu people are indigenous people living in the Terai plains on the border of Nepal and India. A smaller number of Tharus live in India, mostly in Champaran District of Bihar and in Nainital District of Uttar Pradesh. The Tharu live in longhouses which may hold up to 150 people. The longhouses are built of mud with lattice walls They grow barley, wheat, maize, and rice, as well as raise animals such as chickens, ducks, pigs, and goats. In the big rivers, they use large nets to fish.

Because the Tharu lived in isolation in malarial swamps until the recent use of DDT, they developed a style of decorating the walls, rice containers and other objects in their environment. The Tharu women transform outer walls and verandahs of their homes into colorful paintings dedicated to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of prosperity and fertility.

All Around The World

Each longhouse was covered on the sides with ropelike grass and tree bark. Its roof was made of bark and strengthened with animal skins. If the skins and bark were peeled away, a frame of bent young trees would appear.

Longhouses of the indigenous peoples of North America

Later day Iroquois longhouse housing several hundred people

Interior of a longhouse with Chief Powhatan (detail of John Smith map, 1612)

Longhouses were and are built by native peoples in various parts of North America, sometimes reaching over 100 meters long (330 ft) but generally around 5 to 7 meters wide (16-23 ft). The construction method was also different: the dominant theory is that walls were made of sharpened and fire-hardened poles (up to 1,000 saplings for a 50 meter house) driven into the ground and the roof consisted of leaves and grass. Strips of bark were then woven horizontally through the lines of poles to form more or less weatherproof walls with doors usually in one end of the house, although doors also were built into sides of especially long longhouses.They were long and sometimes had fireplaces that kept them warm.

Iroquois and other East Coast longhouses

The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee or People of the Longhouses) who lived in New York and Ontario built and lived in longhouses. Longer than they were wide, these longhouses had openings at both ends that served as doors and were covered with animal skins during the winter to keep out the cold. On average a typical longhouse was about 80 feet (24 m) long by 18 feet (5.5 m) wide by 18 feet (5.5 m) high (24 x 5.5 x 5.5 m) and was meant to house up to twenty or more families. Poles were set in the ground and supported by horizontal poles along the walls. The roof is made by bending a series of poles, resulting in an arc-shaped roof. The frame is covered by bark,and twigs that is sewn in place and layered as shingles, and reinforced by light poles.

Missionaries who visited these longhouses often wrote about how dark the interior of the dwelling was.

At the outer regions of the woodland housing locality were inviolable protective palisades that stood fourteen to sixteen feet high safeguarding the housing region from foreign nations and wild animals.

Ventilation openings, later singly dubbed as a smoke hole were positioned at intervals possibly totaling five to six along the roofing of the long house.

Tribes or ethnic groups in the northeast of North America, south and east of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie that had traditions of building longhouses are, among others, the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee) including the Five Nations Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. Also the Wyandot and Erie. Another large group that built longhouses, among others, were the Lenni Lenape, living from the lower Hudson river, along the Delaware river and on both sides of the Delaware Bay, and the Pamunkey of the maybe-related Powhattan Confederacy in Virginia

Northwest Coast longhouse

A longhouse at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

As there were more forests along the Pacific coast, these long house are built with logs or split log frame and covered with split log planks, and sometimes an additional bark cover. In an Iroquois longhouse there may have been 20 or more families which were all related through the mothers' side, along with the other relatives. Cedar is the preferred resource. The length of these long houses is usually 60–100 feet (18–30 m).^{[citation needed]} The wealthy built extraordinarily large longhouses. The Suquamish Old Man House at what became the Port Madison Reservation was 500 x 40–60 ft (152 x 12–18 m), c. 1850.

Usually there is one doorway that faces the shore. Each long house contains a number of booths along both sides of the central hallway, separated by wooden containers (akin to modern drawers). Each booth also has its own individual fire. Usually an extended family occupied one long house, and cooperated in obtaining food, building canoes, and other daily tasks. The roof is a slanted shed roof. and pitched to various degrees depending upon the rainfall.^{[citation needed]} The gambrel roof was unique to Puget Sound 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 is often accompanied with a long house, though the style varies greatly, and sometimes is even used as part of the entrance way. Long houses had enough room to fit up to 50 people.^{[citation needed]}

Tribes or ethnic groups along the North American Pacific coast with some sort of longhouse building traditions are among others Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Makah, Clatsop, Coast Salish and Multnomah (tribe).

Excavations at Ozette

The rare preservation at Ozette gives a detailed look at the houses of the past. From beneath mud flows, archaeologists have recovered timbers and planks, and with them has come a unique chance to see household arrangements from the distant past. 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 around cooking hearths, each still safeguarding evidence of what its occupants did. 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 very 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 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 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.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Morrison, Hedda. [1962] (Fifth impression 1974). Life in a Longhouse

- Borneo Literature Bureau Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. Printed in Hong Kong by Dai Nippon Printing Co.(Int.) Ltd. - with translations to Malay, Iban and Chinese (Pendiau Dirumah Panjai - Kehidupan Di-Rumah Panjang).

• Dickson, M.G. [1962] (Third edition (revised) 1968).Sarawak and its People

- Borneo Literature Bureau. Printed in Hong Kong by Dai Nippon Printing Co.(Int.) Ltd.

• Dawson, Barry and Gillow, John (1994). The Traditional Architecture of Indonesia. London: Thames and Hudson, 32–33. ISBN 0-500-34132X. 
• Suttles, Wayne P..; Lane, Barbara (1990-08-20). "South Coast Salish". Handbook of North American Indians 7. Northwest coast: p. 491. Ed. Sturtevant, William C.. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-020390-2 (v. 7). Retrieved on 2006-08-06.

External links

All links retrieved June 13, 2011.

• Longhouses A Mohawk Iroquois Village, New York State Museum
• The Longhouse Article by Kanatiyosh
• Iroquoian Longhouse Royal Ontario Museum
• Housing Iroquois Indian Museum

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