Cherokee Winter House

Cherokee Winter House. (go-la ga-la-tso-de). , Late prehistoric and early historic period Cherokee villages typically included winter or "hot" houses and summer houses, large community buildings such as town or council houses as well as numerous smaller structures for religious/healing, storage and agricultural purposes. Most of these structures were built with vertically placed wood posts; the evidence for this is clearly visible in archaeological excavations. Winter houses, as the name implies, provided living space during the coldest months of the year. These structures were typically either round, square with rounded corners or, in the early historic period, octagonal in shape. Using a form of wattle and daub construction, the exterior walls were comprised of numerous upright posts interwoven with split rivercanes or small saplings. The interior floors were usually excavated from 1 foot to 1.5 feet below the surrounding ground level. Clayey soil from this excavation was mixed with chopped grasses and water to form a daub used to thickly plaster the wall wattles. Any remaining dirt was piled against the exterior wall to form a sloping backfill berm. The interior of the house usually had four large central roof support posts surrounding a central hearth which provided heat, a cooking fire and light. Winter house roofs were typically covered with either tree bark or grass thatching. Recent research indicates that the interior roof rafters and roof covering may have also been smeared with daub to act as a fire retardant. Sleeping benches, often covered with woven rivercane mats and animal hides, lined the walls. Entrance to the house was made through a low, narrow corridor about 2 feet wide and 4 feet high that extended through the backfill berm. In order to keep out excess moisture and retain as much heat as possible, winter houses had no windows or smoke holes, light being provided solely by the hearth fire. Both winter and summer houses were probably also used for storage during the off season., "The walls of the houses are constructed of a wooden frame, then lathed and plastered inside and out with a reddish well tempered day or mortar, which gives them the appearance of red brick walls; and these houses are neatly covered or roofed with Cypress bark or shingles of that tree," wrote William Bartram in 1792., In 1775, James Adair described elements of the winter house as follows: , Walls: "To raise these, they fix deep in the ground, a sufficient number of strong forked posts... all of an equal height, about five or six feet above the surface of the ground..." , Wattle and daub: "Then they weave them thick with their split saplings, and daub them all over about six or seven inches thick with tough clay, well mixt with withered grass..." , Thatch: "...they thatch the house with the longest sort of dry grass, that their land produces." , Entrance corridor: "The door... is commonly about four feet high, and so narrow as not to admit two to enter it abreast, with a winding passage for the space of six or seven feet..." , Earth berm: "As they usually build on rising ground, the floor is often a yard lower than the earth..."., In 1757, William DeBrahm described a winter house at Chota (located on the Little Tennessee River in east Tennessee) this way: "...about 30 feet Diameter, and 15 feet high, in the form of a Cone, with Poles and thatched, without any Air-hole, except for a small Door about 3 feet high and 18 Inches wide. In the Center of the hot-house they burn fire of well seasoned dry wood; round the inside are Bedsteads fixed to the Studs, which support the Middle of each Post; these Houses they resort to with their Children in the Winter Nights." At the Warren Wilson site in Buncombe County, more than a dozen houses are found arranged in a circular pattern around an open plaza and surrounded by a palisade of vertical posts. These houses were somewhat circular to square with rounded corners, with construction conforming closely to early ethnographic descriptions. In Cherokee at the Ravensford site (location of the Cherokee comprehensive school) an octagonal house was excavated along with a rectangulär summer house, in much the same configuration as this exhibit.