Indigenous North American Longhouse Architecture

Longhouses were a style of residential dwelling built by Native American and First Nations peoples in various parts of North America, and separate, larger longhouses were sometimes built for community meetings. Among the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of the eastern woodlands, a typical longhouse measured about 24.4 by 5.5 meters, though some exceeded 75 meters in length, and could house twenty or more families, most of them matrilineally related; builders raised fire-hardened wooden poles, as many as a thousand saplings for a fifty-meter structure, and wove horizontal strips of bark between them beneath an arc-shaped roof layered with bark, leaves and grasses. On the Northwest Coast, longhouses were built from logs or split-log frames covered with split planks, cedar being the preferred lumber, with individual family hearths set in separate booths along a central hallway; the Old Man House of the Suquamish, built around 1850, measured roughly 152 by 12 to 18 meters.