Cherokee Townhouses: Architectural Adaptation to European Contact in the Southern Appalachians

Abstract

Public structures known as townhouses were hubs of public life in Cherokee towns in the southern Appalachians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D., and in towns predating European contact. Townhouses were sources of cultural stability and conservatism during periods of dramatic change, and they were an architectural medium through which Cherokee towns adapted to life in the postcontact Southeast. This article summarizes the characteristics of townhouses in the southern Appalachians dating from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries A.D., focusing on size and shape, the surfaces on which they were built, sequences of building and rebuilding, and the presence or absence of burials inside townhouses. The architectural form of townhouses rooted people to particular places, but Cherokee townhouses also enabled towns to move from one place to another, because a town could build a townhouse at any particular place, old or new.

A Remote Sensing Perspective on Shoreline Modification, Canal Construction and Household Trajectories at Pineland along Florida's Southwestern Gulf Coast

“…This would certainly be a large structure. Early Spanish accounts of neighbouring sites in the area describe sizeable structures (Solís de Merás, , p. 145); however, it is well within the range of town or council houses observed elsewhere in the American Southeast (see Thompson, ; Rodning, ).…”