For thousands of years before Europeans ever set foot in North America, Native Americans had been building homes, communities and nations across the continent, with cultural traditions and architectural styles as diverse and disparate as the terrain itself.
From snow-structured igloos designed to withstand freezing temperatures to airy chickees ideal for tropical climates, we’ll explore the many types of homes built by indigenous peoples across North America, and discover where you can still visit them today.
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Traditionally associated with the Iroquois people of North America or the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, longhouses were plank board or bark-covered structures built in the shape of an arbour. The homes were typically 20-23 feet in width – large enough to accommodate many families.
A long central isle down the middle of the house divided it into two compartments along either side, with another compartment at the end of the home usually used for storage. While the separate compartments allowed families to have their own semi-private spaces, the central isle was a gathering place for everyone, with shared hearths spaced at intervals down the length of the isle.
While not many longhouses are still in use today, many reconstructions have been created to preserve the history and heritage of these traditional homes. This reconstructed 17th-century longhouse in the Ganondagan State Historic Site in northern New York state includes sleeping bunks, cooking fires and many other domestic items which would have filled these multi-family homes.
The word 'pueblo' was originally coined by Spanish explorers to describe the indigenous towns they discovered in some areas that are now known as New Mexico and Arizona. The villages consisted of stone or adobe multi-storey apartment complexes, with higher stories accessible only by means of ladders propped up against the buildings as a form of defence.
Pueblos were designed to house multiple families and up to thousands of inhabitants, with separate family apartments constructed cheek by jowl, and connected by shared walls and corridors. The buildings themselves were usually built around large central courtyards or plazas, and strategically positioned in easily defensible positions, such as steep mesas.
Thanks to their enduring materials and presumably the assiduous upkeep of their inhabitants, many pueblos are still in use today, occupied either seasonally or year-round. One of the largest and oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the US is Acoma Pueblo (pictured here) near Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is believed to be approximately 2,000 years old, according to local tribal tradition.
A domed hut traditionally used by northeastern Native American tribes, such as the Wampanoag, wetus were designed to provide seasonal shelter for families. Wetus were built in wooded, coastal areas, and were used as temporary housing in which their inhabitants engaged in the seasonal chores of hunting and fishing.
Wetus were constructed using frames of red cedar that were covered over with tree bark or mats of woven grass or reeds. These homes were large enough to house more than one family, with places for sleeping, a hearth for cooking and storage for tools and foodstuffs.
Due to the temporary nature of the structures, no early examples of wetus remain, but many reconstructions can be visited at heritage sites across the northeastern US. The Plymouth Patuxet Museums in Plymouth, Massachusetts, offer an entire recreated Patuxet homesite, where visitors can learn about Native American history dating back over 12,000 years.
Similar in its structure to the wetu, wigwams were domed, semi-permanent homes constructed from arched poles and covered in layered materials including hides, cloth, reeds, grass, bark or rushes. Wigwams were traditionally used by the indigenous peoples of North America that are now known as the northeastern United States, Quebec, Ontario, and central Canada.
Wigwams were more circular than wetus, and their rounded outer shells made them ideally suited to withstand even the worst weather. Their frames were built from green saplings, which were still flexible and therefore unlikely to snap in high gales, with the layering of their outer shells helping to prevent the penetration of wind or rain.
However, like the wetu, wigwams were designed to be temporary dwellings, used as housing during seasonal tasks like hunting and fishing. There are recreations of these structures at heritage sites in both the northeastern US and Canada, such as this traditional Innu Wigwam at the Mokotakan open-air museum in Quebec.
Wattle and daub homes were traditionally used by the Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee peoples, and were predominant in areas which are now the states of Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida.
The houses were designed to be permanent, ideally suited to the farmer-hunter lifestyle of the tribes that built them, and were typically constructed in villages enclosed by palisades to prevent attack.
These houses were formed by driving stakes into the ground and weaving thin branches between them to form loose timbered panels. This practice was known as wattling. The daub part of the construction was the application of glutenous mixture which would bind the branches together.
Daub could be made by combining binders – a substance to hold the mix together such as clay, chalk, or lime – and aggregates – that would give the mixture substance and stability, such as mud, sand, or crushed stone. Daub could also include fibrous elements such as hair or straw to increase flexibility and prevent sinkage. After the application of the daub, the entire structure was whitewashed to make it water-resistant.
Hogans were a traditional form of dwelling and ceremonial structure associated specifically with the Navajo people of Arizona and New Mexico. The buildings were dome-shaped, formed of a log or stone base which was then covered in densely packed mud or dirt.
While they didn't have windows, hogans did include a circular hole in the ceiling to permit smoke to escape, and an entrance which usually faced east towards the rising sun, like that of a tipi. Hogans usually only had one room, with no internal divisions.
Like pueblos, the adobe structure of the hogan enabled several older versions of these dwellings to survive, and they are still used today for some residential and ceremonial purposes. Hogans are also lauded for their energy efficiency – the densely packed earth keeping the homes cool and well-ventilated in summer, and well-insulated in winter – and their structure has inspired the more modern earthship architectural trend.
Featuring a raised platform supported by poles, open on the sides but with a thatched roof, chickee shelters were adopted by the Seminole natives of the Florida Everglades during the Second and Third Wars against US troops. These structures, also known as stilt houses or platform dwellings, were adopted in place of the log cabins the Seminoles lived in prior to the wars because they were easier to construct and move quickly.
In any given settlement, each chickee had a specific purpose, including sleeping, cooking, and eating. The chickee style of architecture is made distinctive by its palmetto thatch and bare cypress log frames, the latter of which was derived by the log cabins which preceded them.
However, in contrast to the log cabins, the chickee’s open sides made them better suited to the damp air of the deeper Everglades into which the Seminoles were being forced.
Today, traditional chickee homes are on display at Florida’s Miccosukee Indian Village Museum in the Everglades, but their architectural style has influenced more modern designs throughout the state. Chickee-inspired structures are frequent additions to restaurants, upscale homes, gardens and poolsides, and even as camping structures in the Everglades National Park.
Another traditional dwelling that will likely look familiar is the igloo, a semi-spherical shelter built from densely packed blocks of snow. Igloos are traditionally associated with the Inuit peoples of the Arctic, although they have been used by tribes in Canada's Central Arctic and the Qaanaaq area of Greenland.
In the Inuit language, ‘iglu’ refers to a house built of any material, but outside of this dialect, the more common term ‘igloo’ refers specifically to homes built from blocks of snow, traditionally in a dome shape. These snow blocks can be used to trap pockets of air, making them an excellent insulator against the sub-freezing arctic temperatures.
To work as a building material, the snow needs to be of a certain consistency, ideally snow which has been blown by the wind, which helps the ice crystals to interlock.
The snow is carved out of the ground into blocks using saws, and these bricks are assembled into a paraboloid structure, which helps prevent the blocks buckling in on each other. Igloos can be built in a wide variety of sizes, with smaller structures used for temporary purposes, and larger ones serving as semi-permanent family homes. While igloos are no longer commonly used as housing, they remain culturally significant to Arctic communities.
Built by the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, plank houses have been used as dwellings in North America for at least 3,000 years, records show, but due to the nature of the building material, there is little concrete documentation for how widespread the use of this structure was.
Plank houses were composed of cedar logs, which were then assembled in a style similar to more modern American frame houses. The planks were driven into the ground side by side, each plank overlapping with the adjoining one by several inches to prevent the penetration of wind or rain. The walls would then be covered over by a slanting roof, usually also made of cedar planking.
The houses were designed to accommodate large extended families, but were typically only intended as winter dwellings, replaced in the summer by more portable, temporary forms of shelter. However, during the long winter months, residents of plank houses took time to decorate them with intricate carvings and paintings honouring their ancestors, family history, and family prestige.
Perhaps the most iconic and familiar of these traditional Native American dwellings, the tipi, or teepee, is a conical tent constructed of animal hides stretched over a wooden pole frame. Tipis are typically associated with the peoples indigenous to the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies of North America, most prominently the seven tribes of the Sioux.
The term ‘tipi’ is an anglicisation of a term from the Dakota and Lakota languages. While the tipi is similar to many other types of conical dwellings, it is made distinctive by the smoke flaps which enable fires to be lit within without damage to the structure. Tipis are designed to be portable, an important feature for the frequently nomadic lifestyle of the Plains indigenous peoples.
Tipis were usually erected in circles around a communal campfire, arranged in order of rank or position within the family and community. Traditionally, both the entrances to the tipis, and the entrance to the camp itself would face east, towards the sunrise. While many tipis are still in use today, they are largely for ceremonial purposes rather than daily living. These modern tipis tend to feature canvas coverings instead of the traditional tanned hides used in the past.
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