The longhouse was the principal dwelling of the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, including the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of present-day New York and the Huron-Wendat, Petun and Neutral of Southern Ontario. It sheltered several related families under a single long, rounded bark roof, and remained the common residence of the region until about the 18th century.
Frame
Builders set stiff posts in the ground along both sides of the house, then bent flexible poles over and fastened them to the tops of the wall posts to form the roof. Horizontal poles were lashed across with strips of bark or bark rope to stiffen the frame. The result was a long building with straight sides and a rounded, arbour-like roof.
Bark covering
The whole frame was sheathed in sheets of bark. The Huron-Wendat used cedar bark, while the Haudenosaunee used elm bark. Because walls and roofs do not survive, archaeologists reconstruct them from post moulds in the soil, from the accounts of French missionaries and explorers, and from oral histories.
Hearths and smoke
Hearths ran down a central aisle, typically 6-13 m (20-43 ft) apart, with about four to twelve in a house and two families sharing each fire. Vents or smoke holes in the roof above the hearths let smoke escape.
Size
Widths of about 6-9 m (20-30 ft) are recorded; the 18th-century writer Joseph-François Lafitau gave figures in this range. Houses could be lengthened as households grew. One longhouse excavated in 1970-72 at the Moyer site in Southern Ontario was 93 m (305 ft) long.
Reconstructions
Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, near Midland, Ontario, is a reconstruction of a mission founded about 1640, rebuilt in the 1960s, and includes longhouses that show the roof form.
Related forms
On the Pacific Northwest coast, similarly long communal houses developed independently but were roofed with split cedar planks rather than bark (see plank-house).