Missionaries wrote about how dark the inside of the houses were. The only other openings in the house were at the ceiling. There were holes there to allow the fire pit smoke to escape, but those holes provided very little natural light.
The fire pits were located in the hallway and shared by the families. The following lists catalog the specific articles, stories, legends and research materials of this website. Click Here to give an online gift. Toggle navigation. Iroquois Longhouse The Iroquois longhouse were built to house 20 or more families. Related Stories: Iroquois Longhouse Articles Home Page The following lists catalog the specific articles, stories, legends and research materials of this website. Firewood was stacked in areas near the entrances at either end of the structure.
Covered pits dug inside the house also stored food. Aside from their practical uses, longhouses served as sites of political gatherings and ceremonies. Followers of the Handsome Lake Religion , for example, continue to refer to the buildings that house their ceremonies as longhouses.
The term also carried philosophical and cultural meaning. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — originally made up of the Mohawk , Oneida , Seneca , Cayuga and Onondaga the Tuscarora joined later — characterized their association as a longhouse of five fires.
In this way, these nations themselves represented the longhouse, demonstrating the centrality of the longhouse to Iroquoian culture. While longhouses are no longer used to house families, they remain important to Iroquoian history and culture. Many sacred ceremonies and cultural gatherings are still held in longhouses. Reconstructions of these historic structures can also be found in a variety of museums and cultural centres, such as the Museum of Ontario Archaeology and Sainte Marie Among the Hurons also in Ontario , where visitors can learn about the history of Iroquoian village life first-hand.
Munson and Susan M. Jamieson Museum of Ontario Archeology Visit this museum to see a reconstructed longhouse and experience what life in a longhouse might have been like years ago. Visit their site to learn more. Ste Marie Among the Hurons Located near Midland, Ontario, this world-renowned reconstruction illustrates the interaction of the French and Wendat nations. Visitors get a unique opportunity to see the earliest Canadian pioneer life, through guided or self-guided visits, school group tours, interactive education programs, special events, and corporate functions.
Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. Remember me. I forgot my password. Why sign up? Create Account. Suggest an Edit. Longhouses have another thing in common besides their shape: they were built to serve as a home for a large extended family.
An extended family includes a number of family units consisting of parents and children, plus grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. 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.
All these families belonged to the same clan; each clan in a village had its own longhouse; the clans had branches in other villages. Clans were named for animals and birds; Turtle, Bear and Hawk are examples.
The symbol for the clan was used in decorations of household objects, in tattoos, and on the front of the longhouse. Members of a clan are all descendants of the same person. In Iroquois clans this person was a woman. All the people in the clan traced their heritage back to her through their female ancestors.
Each Iroquois person was born into a clan and remained in that clan for life. Being related, people within a clan could not intermarry; one had to marry someone in a different clan. When a young woman married, her husband came to live in her longhouse, where they would make their new home. When a young man married, he moved away from the longhouse where he'd been raised into his bride's longhouse, but he continued to have close ties with his own clan.
The extended family not only shared the same building for their home, but they also worked together to make their living. The clan was the basic social and economic unit in Iroquois society and the leadership in the clans was through the women, because the kinship followed the mother's bloodline. The women managed the affairs of their longhouse, the farming, and distribution of food. They also selected the men who would represent their clan in the tribal council.
To the Iroquois people, the longhouse meant much more than the building where they lived. The longhouse was also a symbol for many of the traditions of their society. Five nations formed the original Iroquois Confederacy. These nations shared a territory they thought of as a large longhouse. The Senecas, who lived in the western end of this territory, were the "Keepers of the Western Door" of the Longhouse.
The Mohawks, who lived in the eastern end of the territory, were the "Keepers of the Eastern Door". To the modern Iroquois people, the Longhouse remains a powerful symbol of the ancient union and is important to many traditions. Our knowledge of longhouse life comes from three kinds of sources: archeology, Iroquois oral traditions, and descriptions written by early European explorers.
Archeological record. Our knowledge of longhouses is derived largely from archeological excavations on Iroquoian village sites dating from the s through the s.
Excavations on longhouse sites in New York State and adjacent areas of Quebec and Ontario Provinces, and in Pennsylvania, have provided a wealth of information about longhouse lengths, widths, interior spatial organization, and the uses of these spaces. Iroquois oral language.
Other details about longhouses - from the floor up - are found in the Iroquoian languages themselves. Word lists collected as early as the s preserve names for longhouse parts and uses. Similarly, oral traditions often describe longhouses and longhouse life of long ago.
Descriptions by Europeans. Firsthand descriptions of longhouses made by European explorers, missionaries, and travelers provide information that adds to the archeological record and the languages and oral traditions of the Iroquoian peoples. Jacques Cartier described Iroquoian longhouse villages that he visited along the St. Lawrence River in the mids. His is the first written description of Iroquoian longhouses.
The French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, traveled and lived among the Huron Iroquois of Ontario, Canada, in the early s, and left descriptions of longhouses and longhouse life among these people. Descriptions made by these explorers and missionaries record early changes to longhouse and longhouse village architecture introduced by the use of European metal tools, particularly, trade axes, and by Europeans themselves who at times remodeled longhouses for their own and special uses.
The most detailed description available to us is that of another Jesuit missionary, Reverend Father Joseph-Francois Lafitau. It dates to the s and was written at the Mohawk Iroquois mission community of Kahnawake, near Montreal. Later, travelers among the New York Iroquois, like John Bartram and Conrad Weiser, described some of the last of the long-longhouses, built of post, poles, and saplings, and covered in bark.
By this date s many Iroquois were living together in smaller extended families, requiring smaller, or at least shorter longhouse quarters. These were built on the traditional pattern and of traditional materials, while the homes of some neighbors were log cabins of hewn or peeled logs and with bark roofs.
A longhouse has a framework built of posts and poles and is covered with sheets of bark. The following description is based on many different sources of information. Archeologists explore sites of old Iroquois villages by digging carefully in the upper layers of the soil. At some of these sites, they found traces of many longhouses in the form of circular stains in the earth where wooden posts had once been set as a frame for a longhouse.
When the posts rotted away long ago, they left these stains in the soil which are called post molds. The pattern of these post molds makes the outline of the missing longhouse. Figure 2. An archeological excavation. Archeologists have carefully removed the soil a little at a time to reveal evidence of village life. They set stakes where interesting things are found and make notes describing them.
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