From Devon to Borneo, people independently built homes as long communal halls
Europe's first farmers, the Haudenosaunee of the American northeast, Bronze Age Koreans and the Dayak of Borneo never met, yet all settled on the same design: a long, narrow building sheltering many families under one roof. In medieval Britain, livestock lived at one end and people at the other.
In Europe the form arrived with the first farmers of the centre and west around 5000 BCE, in hamlets of six to twelve longhouses, each home to a large extended family. Germanic longhouses built by cattle farmers turned up along the southwest shores of the North Sea around the third or fourth century BCE, and they may have given rise to the Scandinavian langhus, the Low German house and British variants.
Exmoor still has dozens of longhouses older than 1600, some tree-ring dated to before 1400. A typical one was a single storey, one room deep, dug into a slope, with rough stone walls topped by cob, because lime mortar was barely known before the 17th century. Before glass became available in the mid-16th century, doors and unglazed lattice windows faced south only, for shelter and sun. A cross passage divided the human half from the animals at the lower end, where a hole in the wall allowed mucking out, and smoke from the fire pit drifted up through the thatch. By 1700 most had been upgraded with chimneys, bread ovens, stairs, glazed windows and separate barns.
Haudenosaunee longhouses were covered in bark or boards and shaped like an arbour, about 6 to 7 metres wide, with a 3-metre central aisle and family compartments down both sides. Hearths sat every 6 to 7 metres along the aisle, each shared by two families, and houses were lengthened to fit the number of families. At Daepyeong in Korea, longhouses dated to around 1100 to 850 BC show a similar row of fireplaces.
In Borneo, Dayak longhouses stand on stilts with a shared gallery along one side and private rooms along the other, a pattern so well suited to jungle life that unrelated groups adopted it. Traditionally built of durable Bornean ironwood, they are laid out like a tree, the front facing sunrise. A leader called the tuai enforces rules, and breaking them is believed to make the community heated, or prone to disaster, until it is ritually cooled. Many Borneo place names include Long, meaning river, and most mark current or former longhouses.
Source: Longhouse
