Neolithic long house

The Neolithic long house was a long, narrow timber dwelling built by the first farmers in Europe around 7,000 years ago. Long houses are present across numerous regions and time periods in the archaeological record.

It is thought that these Neolithic houses had no windows and only one doorway. The end farthest from the door appears to have been used for grain storage with working activities being carried out in the better lit door end and the middle used for sleeping and eating.

Twenty or thirty people, could have lived in each house with villages of six or seven houses known. They first appeared in central Europe in connection with the early Neolithic cultures such as the Linearbandkeramic or Cucuteni culture.

Structurally, the Neolithic long house was supported by rows of large timbers holding up a pitched roof. The walls would not have supported much weight and would have been quite short beneath the large roof. Sill beams ran in foundation trenches along the sides to support the low walls. A long house would measure around 20m in length and 7m in width.

North America

Longhouses were also built by native peoples in various parts of North America, sometimes reaching over 100m long but still around 5m to 7m wide. The construction method was also different: the dominant theory is walls were made of sharpened and fire-hardened poles (up to 1,000 saplings for a 50m house) driven into the ground with their tops bent over and tied to the opposite wall's poles. Strips of bark were then woven horizontally through the lines of poles to form more or less weatherproof walls with doors usually in one end of the house, although doors also were built into sides of especially long longhouses.

• Population estimates of North American longhouses.
• Interior layout.
• Archaeological features within/near longhouses: hearths, sweat lodges.
• Relationship with beginnings of agriculture, sedentarism, ceramics and villages/"civilization".
• Need for a forest for raw materials.
• Geographical and temporal distribution of longhouses in New World.