Long house
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In archaeology and anthropology, a long house or longhouse is a type of long, narrow single room building built by peoples in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe and North America.
Many were built from timber and often represent the earliest form of permanent structure in many cultures. Types include the Neolithic long house of Europe, the Medieval Dartmoor longhouse and the Native American long house.
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Europe
In archeology there are two european longhouse types that are now extinct.
- The Neolithic long house type that was introduced with the first farmers of central and western europe around 5000 BC.
- The germanic cattle farmer longhouses that emerged along the southwestern North Sea coast in the third or fourth century BC and might be the ancestor of several medieval housetypes such as the scandinavian langhus, the English, Welsh and Scottish longhouse variants and the German and Dutch '"Fachhallenhaus".
The medieval longhouse types of Europe of which some examples have survived are among others:
- The Scandinavian or Viking Langhus.
- The southwest England variants in Dartmoor and Wales
- The northwest England type in Cumbria
- The scottish Longhouse, "Black house" or "taighean dubha"
North America
The Native American long house emerged in the north east and west coast of North America.
Borneo Longhouse
Many of the inhabitants of the south east asian island of Borneo (Dayak) live traditionally in buildings known as longhous (Rumah panjang, rumah panjai). Common to all is that they are built raised of the ground on stilts and are devided into a more or less public area along one side and a row of privat living quarters lined along the other side. This seems to have been the way of building best accustomed to life in the jungle in the past, as otherwise hardly related people have come to built their dwellings in similar ways. One may observe similarities to south american jungle villages living also in large single structures.
The layout of a traditional longhouse could be described thus:
Along the whole length of the building runs a wall placed near the middle. The one side would seem like a corridor or hall from one end to the other, while the other side is blocked from public view by the wall.
Behind this wall lay the private units (bilek), each with a single door for each family. These are usually devided from each other by walls of their own and contain the living and sleeping space. The kitchens (dapor) sometimes reside within this space but are quite often situated in rooms of their own, added to the back of a bilek or even in a building standing a little away from the longhouse and accessed by a small bridge due to the fear of fire.
The corridor itself is divided into three parts. The space in front of the door (tempuan) belongs to each bilek unit and is used privately. This is where rice can be pounded or other domestic work can be done. A public corridor (ruai), basically used like a village road, runs the whole length in the middle of the open hall. Along the outer wall is the space where guests can sleep (pantai). On this side a large veranda (tanju) is built in front of the building where the rice (padi) is dried and other outdoor activities can take place. Under the roof is a sort of attic (sadau) that runs in the middle of the house under the higher part of the roof. Here the padi, other food and other things can be stored. Sometimes the sadau has a sort of gallery from which the life in the ruai can be observed. The pigs and chicken live underneath the house between the stilts.
The houses built by the different tribes and ethnic groups can differ from each other. Houses described as above may be used by the Iban (sea Dayak) and Melikin. Similar houses are built by the "Land Dayak" however with wider verandas and extra buildings for the unmarried and visitors. The buildings of the Kayan, Kenyah, Murut and Kelabit used to have fewer walls between individual bilik units. The Punan seem to be the last ethnic grouped that adopted this type of house building.
A lot of places in Sarawak still have the word "Long" in their name and most of these still are or once were longhouses. Some like Long Semado in Sarawak even have airfields of their own.
- A List of some of the ethnic groups of Sarawaks
- Kenyah-Kayan Tradition
- Psychiatric interviews in a Borneo longhouse (pdf)
- A Longhouse on the Internet with scetches of the *layout
A traditional house type on the island of Siberut, part of the Mentawai Islands some 130 kilometers to the west of the coast of Sumatra is also described as Longhouse. Some 5-10 families may live in each but the are organised differently on the inside.