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The following excerpt is from Neal Ferris’ “Place, Space, and Dwelling in the Late Woodland” in Before Ontario: The Archaeology of a Province, edited by Marit K. Munson and Susan M. Jamieson.
Take a moment to notice your surroundings as you read this chapter. Perhaps you are in a chair inside your heated home during a cold winter’s day, the sun shining through a window, warming your hands as you hold this book. Perhaps you need to caulk that window because it is letting in a draft – but meanwhile you know you can turn up the thermostat to warm yourself and your family.
Now imagine yourself on a similar sunny and cold day, inside a pole and barkcovered longhouse around 1500 CE, part of a village whose descendants would come to be known as Iroquoian people, at a place that later was known as the Lawson Site, in London, Ontario, on the grounds of the Museum of Ontario Archaeology. As you stand in the longhouse, you feel the cold leaking in and around you every time someone enters or leaves the building, and you feel it rising up from the ground along the sides of the walls. The inside is a dim place, though there is a brief flash of blinding light some thirty metres down at the other end of the longhouse as someone moves the flap back to go through the other entrance. You see sunbeams shine in through vents in the rounded roof, slicing through the dried plants hanging in the rafters and outlining the bundled forms of the ancestors who lie wrapped and resting in the upper platforms of the long bunkbed-like benches that run down either side of the house. The sunbeams also highlight the smoke that hovers near the ceiling, rising from the glowing and flickering hearths spaced every few metres down the centre of the longhouse. (…)
This picture is speculative, drawn from descriptions I have read of Europeans who visited and dwelled with the descendants of the Lawson Site and other Iroquoian speaking peoples a century later. It is also drawn from my experiences excavating and interpreting the floors of longhouses at Iroquoian villages like the one described, and from helping to build a longhouse, and even from sitting, eating, and listening to stories and songs inside a longhouse built in the present. More than any other thought that crosses my mind when I am in a longhouse, I often try to imagine living in that longhouse during a cold winter’s day, similar to the many that I have experienced over the years also living in this same region of Ontario – but always inside a brick home with central heating.
(…)
The most common type of structure found by archaeologists working on sites from the Late Woodland period are longhouses. Longhouses are typical of villages that archaeologists tend to assume are ancestral to Iroquoian-speakers, although other peoples used longhouses too. Most longhouses had an elliptical or cigar-shaped outline, with straight sides and rounded or slightly squared-off ends outlined by rows of posts.
The space inside these walls is often distinct from space outside, due to visible concentrations of post moulds, features, and other soil discolorations that mark interior walls, support posts, hearth areas, and even buildup of waste and dirt. One or two lines of post moulds often run along either side of a central corridor through the middle of the house – probably bunk lines that supported benches or raised sleeping platforms. A number of hearths are usually visible along the central corridor, made up of reddish soil baked by wood fires maintained in those spots. House floors contain other features, too, such as holes or pits that were used to hold garbage or ash from hearths, or to cache food or supplies, or as burial places. At either end of the house, where the straight side walls begin to taper, open spaces may have served as storage areas for food or firewood. Entrances usually appear as simple gaps in the row of wall posts, at one or both ends of the longhouse or slightly to one side. Occasionally, a house had an entranceway or tunnel sticking out from the entrance, probably serving as a windbreak or heat sink.
From a strictly archaeological perspective, we cannot tell exactly what a longhouse looked like above ground, as walls and roofs did not survive. Sometimes, the angle and direction of post moulds in the ground can hint at the orientation of poles to the structure’s roof. In general, though, archaeologists turn to historic accounts written by Europeans in the 1600s and 1700s who visited or lived in longhouses and to oral histories and craft traditions in communities today. Experimenting with replicas of these buildings also provides some insights. Based on these sources, we think that longhouse walls were covered with bark or hide over wall poles that were bent over and tied off to create a closed, curved ceiling. Vents or flaps in the ceiling probably allowed smoke from hearths to escape and air to circulate. Depending on the season, entrances may have been covered with a hide flap or barrier.
From historic sources we know that it was common for two families to share each hearth found along the central corridor of the longhouse. These families would have lived on opposite sides of the fire with personal space around, under, and on the benches adjacent to the hearth. Historic descriptions and census records suggest that a longhouse could have been home to many families, with anywhere from a dozen to nearly one hundred people living in a single longhouse. The people in a single longhouse were likely all connected to each other by extended family ties or lineage. And since we know that Iroquoian societies historically traced family connections through the mother’s family, it was probably the women in the longhouse who shaped and defined who belonged in that particular house. So while a longhouse would have been a crowded, noisy, and lively place to reside, all that noise was the sound of a family living together.
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