Longhouses were built from whatever natural materials the local landscape provided: wood poles, tree bark, split planks, turf, thatch, and clay. The specific combination depended on where and when the longhouse was built. Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) longhouses in northeastern North America relied heavily on elm bark over wooden frames. Pacific Northwest longhouses used massive split cedar planks. Viking longhouses combined timber with turf or wattle and daub. Neolithic European longhouses, the oldest of all, used saplings plastered with clay and roofed with bundled thatch.
Haudenosaunee Longhouses: Bark Over Bent Poles
The longhouses most people picture when they hear the word belong to the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy of nations (including the Mohawk, Seneca, and Oneida) in what is now New York and the surrounding region. These structures were framed with wooden poles set into the ground, then covered almost entirely in sheets of tree bark. Elm bark was the preferred material when available, but builders also used ash, fir, spruce, and cedar bark depending on the season and local forests. Cedar bark was widely considered the best option.
The frame itself was rectangular at the base, with vertical poles forming the walls. Builders bent long, flexible poles into arcs across the top to create a rounded roof, then covered everything in bark sheets roughly six feet long and a foot to fifteen inches wide. These bark panels were harvested during a narrow window in spring, when rising sap allowed strips to be peeled cleanly from living trees. Basswood and hickory trees were particularly good sources.
Nothing was nailed. Every joint was lashed together using strips of inner bark, especially from basswood (sometimes called white wood). Rawhide strips cut from deer hides also served as lashing material across many Indigenous building traditions. Wet rawhide was stretched tightly around joints and allowed to dry, shrinking into extremely strong bands. Sinew, the tendon connecting muscle to bone, worked similarly: wetted to make it pliable, wrapped in place, then left to dry and bond with its own natural glue.
A typical Haudenosaunee longhouse measured 180 to 220 feet long, always about 20 feet wide and 20 feet high regardless of length. Some were far larger. Archaeologists have found post hole patterns from two longhouses that stretched 364 and 400 feet, longer than a football field. These enormous structures housed multiple families, each with its own hearth along a central corridor, with smoke escaping through holes in the roof.
Pacific Northwest Longhouses: Split Cedar Planks
Along the Pacific coast, from present-day Oregon through British Columbia, Indigenous peoples like the Chinook built a very different kind of longhouse. Instead of bark sheets, these structures used thick planks hand-split from Western red cedar logs or standing cedar trees. The buildings followed a post-and-beam design: heavy cedar posts were set into the ground to form the structural skeleton, and then cedar planks were fitted to create walls, roofs, and sometimes floors.
Red cedar was ideal for this climate. The wood splits cleanly along its grain, resists rot in the region’s heavy rainfall, and grows to enormous size. Builders could produce wide, straight planks without sawing by driving wedges into logs and splitting them apart. The arrangement of planks varied between communities, with some walls built from vertical planks and others from horizontal ones slotted between posts. The result was a solid, heavy structure that could last for generations and serve as both a home and a ceremonial space.
Viking Longhouses: Timber, Turf, and Clay
Norse longhouses, built across Scandinavia and its colonies from roughly 500 to 1100 CE, used a wider mix of materials because the builders spread across vastly different landscapes. In forested regions of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, walls were constructed from planks or logs. Where wood was plentiful, the longhouse looked like a sturdy timber hall.
In treeless or sparsely wooded areas like Iceland, builders turned to turf. Thick blocks of earth and grass were stacked to form insulating walls several feet thick, sometimes with a minimal timber frame inside for structural support. This made the buildings remarkably warm in harsh northern winters. A third option was wattle and daub: a lattice of woven branches (wattle) plastered over with a mixture of clay, mud, straw, or animal dung (daub) to seal out wind and rain.
Roofs were typically covered in turf, thatch, or wooden shingles, with smoke holes cut in the top to vent the central hearth. Chimneys were rare. The three-aisled longhouse design, with two rows of interior posts supporting the roof and creating a wide central nave, persisted in Scandinavia for nearly 3,000 years, a remarkably stable architectural tradition that survived major cultural and political upheavals.
Neolithic European Longhouses: Saplings, Clay, and Thatch
The oldest longhouses in the archaeological record come from Neolithic Europe, dating back roughly 7,000 years. These early builders worked with stone tools, which limited the size of timber they could cut. Walls were made from small saplings or reeds driven into the ground, tied together with plant fibers, and then plastered over with wet clay. This is the wattle-and-daub method, and it provided surprising rigidity and decent weatherproofing for its simplicity.
Heavier timber frames appeared as well, with a central row of columns supporting a ridgepole and matching rows along the long walls. Rafters ran from the ridgepole to the wall beams, and the roof was covered in thatch: dried grasses or bundled reeds tied in overlapping layers to lightweight poles spanning between rafters. A well-built thatch roof sheds rain effectively and insulates against both heat and cold. These rectangular post-framed buildings established the basic longhouse template that would be adapted across Europe for millennia.
Why Materials Varied So Much
The common thread across all longhouse traditions is resourcefulness. Every version used what the surrounding environment offered in abundance. Northeastern forests provided bark and flexible poles. Pacific coastal forests produced massive, easily split cedar. Scandinavian grasslands offered turf. Neolithic river valleys supplied reeds, clay, and saplings. The engineering challenge was the same everywhere: create a large, shared living space that stays warm, sheds rain, and lasts long enough to justify the labor of building it. The materials changed, but the logic stayed constant.