Contrary to Hollywood myth, not all Native Americans lived in T-pees.  The Cherokees lived in ‘stockades’ constructed similar to a ‘fort’, but without a gate.  They had overlapping fences at the entrance, forming a colonnade.  Inside, the main  building for religious and political meetings, was on a raised earth platform near the center of the village.  The individual families had homes made of logs, roofed with split cedar planks, the walls were sealed against the weather with grass and mud.  Most of the homes were single level, but the larger families had two-story houses.  The door opened into the hearth, or cooking area and there was a hole in the roof to allow smoke to escape.  This room served as the kitchen, dining room, family meeting room, visitor reception and entertainment area, for the telling of Traditional Stories.  The bedroom was adjacent to the main room and was equipped with bunk-beds.   The frames were made of poles tied together with raw-hide strips.  The frames for the lower beds were elevated a foot or so from the dirt floor, and laced with a type of rope made from woven grass or reeds.  Their mattresses consisted of bundles of soft river reeds, and their blankets were made of soft fur. The blankets of male children were mountain-lion skins, to transmit the kid the powers of acute smell, strength cunning and the female children were getting the skins of fawns or buffalo calves, shy and timorous. The furniture consisted in poplar wood stools, storage chests ( clapboards sewn to crossbars with wet stripes of buffalo rawhide ) and three foot-high beds, made of boards.  It can be assumed that the beds had canopy tops and curtains to keep out the cold and provide privacy. Women crafted handsome carpets of hempand they were painted with colored figures. 

The kitchen and bed room were separated with a large animal skin flap, or a curtain made from woven plant fibers for privacy.  The windows were covered with the same material, to keep out rain and cold.  Some houses had skin or woven cloth over the main door, others had a solid wooden door made of split cedar planks, hinged with leather.  The main difference between the Cherokee houses and the settlers log-cabins was the settlers had fire-places for cooking, with stone chimneys, and the Cherokee preferred to build a fire directly in the middle of the dirt floor.

Each house had a vegetable garden next to the house.  Corn was grown on the south side, as that area received the most sunlight.  Each family also helped in the communal village garden for foods that would be used in celebrations, community parties, and to help feed the elderly.  Herbs and fruit were gathered in the local woods by the women and children, while the men were hunting meat and fur.  The medicine man gathered medicinal herbs and materials for dyes and paint.  The elder women tended the small children, and the elder men made tools from stone, bone and wood.  River reeds had many uses, one type could be pounded and split so fine that they could be woven into soft cloth.  Other types of reeds were split and used for baskets.  Another type was either hollowed out for a blow-gun, or trimmed and shaped into a short spear, or arrows. Opposite the front door of each dwelling was a small sweat house. Inside this structure a fire was kept burning and residents sweated there to purify themselves for religious purposed and to cure diseases. There were separate social houses in each village for the women, and wives always retired there when male visitors arrived to see their husbands.

Each group of native Americans has a developed a unique style of housing, depending on their environment and the abundance of building materials.  The Plains people, who hunted buffalo, made portable shelters of buffalo skins, or what is now called TePee.  Fringe-plains people, who farmed the land and hunted smaller game, made circular or square houses by piling buffalo dung, like thin bricks, to form the walls.  Native Americans who lived in marginal forest areas made homes from weaving flexible branches together to form a structure like an upside-down basket.  The Anasazi, farmers who settled in the southwest, occupied large caves and built walls of sun-dried mud and grass, or adobe bricks. 

The Cherokee, which occupied the heavy forests, built their square houses of logs, surrounded by a stockade of logs planted vertically in the ground.  The Cherokee settlements looked very much like a ‘fort’ or ‘town’ with several ‘log cabins’, small gardens, fruit trees, and a central ‘long house’ on a raised mound for gatherings and decision making.  The Long House, or Council House was also used for religious functions, such as weddings and festivals.   One Cherokee town, in North Carolina, has been occupied continuously for about 14,000 years.  The native groups in the Pacific Northwest, who also live in thick forests, have similar ‘log cabins’, a style supposedly introduced by the white settlers.

One unusual sample of stone housing has been found in New England.  It is constructed  over an excavated pit with flat stones forming the walls and roof.  This has been attributed to and early Viking settlement from about 1,500 to 1,200 years BP.  The Vikings either returned to Greenland, died out, or were absorbed into the local population, as were the Chinese settlers in the Pacific Northwest.  Dredging operations in Puget Sound, Washington, have discovered a Chinese ‘Junk’ sailing ship that is about 5,000 years old, and evidence of a Chinese settlement in Port Orchard, Washington. 

Winter hothouses: in the colder areas, the people of each town or village built large winter houses, whose walls and roof were designed to retain and reflect heat. They fixed to the ground a number of six feet posts, forming the basis of a circular wall. To these posts, they tied horizontal pieces of a though white oak, and interwoven vertically slimmer pieces of the same oak. In the middle of the house, forming a square, the builders set four large pine posts, notched on top to receive wall plates. On top, in crib fashion, heavy logs were laid, let into each other as cabin logs are. Above this structure, they put a solid layer of long, dried poles, that were notched where they passed over the cribbed logs and were secured with bark ties. A similar layer bridged the gap from this section to the outer walls, so the finished roof structure was cone shaped.

The hothouse wall was daubed six or seven inches thick with clay mixed with withered grass. As soon as the plaster was half dried, the  builders thatched the roof with a long sort of dry grass. When the peak was reached, an upright pole was fixed, displaying on its top the carved figure of a large eagle. Directly below the pole. four heavy logs were tied together for protection against high winds.

The door of the hothouse was four feet high and very narrow. It was set up in a vestibule that jutted from the side of the building and led to a short ramp with a winding passageway that secured the interior from strong winds and enemies. The floor was three or so feet lower than grade. This provided a dirt bench and exterior wall that could serve as defensive breastwork. Small windows were inserted in the upper wall.

At the end of the fall season, women built a large fire of dry wood in the center of the hothouse. When the wood was a little more than half consumed, they covered it with ashes and struck off some of the top embers with long pieces of hollow cane, used as heaters for each seat or bed in the house. This ritual was repeated several times until daylight. The house, lacking sufficient windows and air was hot, smoky and dark, and during this time, most people lay on their beds with their heads wrapped up in loosely woven cloths.