thumb|Later day Iroquois longhouse (c.1885) 50–60 people
thumb|Interior of a longhouse with [[Powhatan (Native American leader)|Chief Powhatan (detail of John Smith map, 1612)]]
Longhouses were a style of residential dwelling built by Native American and First Nations peoples in various parts of North America. Sometimes separate longhouses were built for community meetings.
Iroquois and the other East Coast longhouses
The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee or "People of the Longhouses"), who reside in the Northeastern United States as well as Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), built and inhabited longhouses. These were sometimes more than in length but generally around wide. Scholars believe walls were made of sharpened and fire-hardened poles (up to 1,000 saplings for a house) driven close together into the ground. Strips of bark were woven horizontally through the lines of poles to form more or less weatherproof walls. Poles were set in the ground and braced by horizontal poles along the walls. The roof is made by bending a series of poles, resulting in an arc-shaped roof. This was covered with leaves and grasses. The frame is covered by bark that is sewn in place and layered as shingles, and reinforced by light swag.
thumb|[[Iroquois longhouse replica in New York State Museum, Albany, NY]]
Doors were constructed at both ends and were covered with an animal hide to preserve interior warmth. Especially long longhouses had doors in the sidewalls as well. Longhouses featured fireplaces in the center for warmth. Holes were made above the hearth to let out smoke, but such smoke holes also let in rain and snow. Ventilation openings, later singly dubbed as a smoke pipe, were positioned at intervals, possibly totalling five to six along the roofing of the longhouse. Missionaries who visited these longhouses often wrote about their dark interiors.
On average a typical longhouse was about and was meant to house up to twenty or more families, most of whom were matrilineally related. The people had a matrilineal kinship system, with property and inheritance passed through the maternal line. Children were born into the mother's clan.
Protective palisades were built around the dwellings; these stood high, keeping the longhouse village safe.
Tribes or ethnic groups in northeast North America, south and east of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, which had traditions of building longhouses include the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee): Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk. The Wyandot (also called Huron) and Erie people, both Iroquoian peoples, also built longhouses, as did the Algonquian peoples, such as the Lenni Lenape, who lived from western New England in Connecticut, in New Jersey along the lower Hudson River and along the Delaware River and both sides of the Delaware Bay. The Pamunkey of the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan Confederacy in Virginia also built longhouses, known as yehakins.
Although the Shawnee were not known to build longhouses, colonist Christopher Gist describes how, during his visit to Lower Shawneetown in January 1751, he and Andrew Montour addressed a meeting of village leaders in a "Kind of State-House of about 90 Feet [] long, with a light Cover of Bark in which they hold their Councils."
Northwest Coast longhouses
thumb|A Northwest Coast longhouse at the [[Museum of Anthropology at UBC|Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia]]
thumb|Interior of a Salish Longhouse, British Columbia, 1864. Watercolour by Edward M. Richardson (1810–1874).
The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest of North America also built a form of longhouse. Theirs were built with logs or split-log frame, and covered with split log planks, and sometimes an additional bark cover. Cedar is the preferred lumber. The wealthy built extraordinarily large longhouses. Old Man House, built by the Suquamish, at what became the Port Madison Squamish Reservation, was , c. 1850.
Usually one doorway faces the shore. Each longhouse contains a number of booths along both sides of the central hallway, separated by wooden containers (akin to modern drawers). Each booth has its own individual hearth and fire. Usually an extended family occupied one longhouse, and cooperated in obtaining food, building canoes, and other daily tasks. The gambrel roof was unique to the Coast Salish of Puget Sound.