EQUIPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
OF BUILDINGS
The furnishings of Wampanoag houses were simple. This was necessary because of the Indians’ mobile life. All household equipment, including the covering of the house itself, had to be carried from camp to camp by the women of the household.
The interiors of houses were lined with bulrush matting. This was decorated with painting or “embroidery”.[303] Beds were family-sized—about six to eight feet across.[304] They were raised a foot to a foot and a half off the ground.[305] Forked sticks were set into the ground to hold poles, across which planks were laid.[306] Rush mats served as the mattress, and the sleepers covered themselves with skins, dressed with the hair left on.[307] Such a bed served the entire family and any visitors they might have.
The remainder of the furnishings consisted mainly of the various containers used for storage, cooking, and food service.[308] Cooking pots were sometimes made of clay, but if possible iron, brass, or copper kettles were obtained from the Europeans, since these were not so easily broken.[309] Birch bark pails were used as water containers, while various sizes of bags and baskets served to store food.[310] Carved wooden bowls, plates, and spoons were also part of the furniture, and some milling equipment probably occupied an indoor place.[311]
Indoor fires were always kept burning.[312] Fuel was either what windfalls could be gathered or an occasional larger tree which was cut and dragged in to be fed into the fireplace by degrees.[313] Over the fireplace, which was a simple hearth made of field stones, there was often a square frame of sticks, supported on forked branches.[314] Pots were hung from this framework. There was almost always a pot of boiling food over the fire, or else there was meat suspended on a stick whose end was buried in the ground.[315] Drying fish or meat was also kept in the house at times—to benefit from the fire when the weather outside was damp. Bundles of rushes, bast fiber, hemp, and the like for making mats and baskets probably would have about completed the inventory of household goods, save for personal possessions and tools.[316]
SETTLEMENT
Descriptions of village layouts, locations and sizes are virtually nonexistent. What information there is, along with some suggested interpretations, is offered as follows:
Both Champlain’s map and drawings of Wampanoag houses at Plymouth harbor suggest that the summer coastal settlements were laid out with each family’s house (or in some cases, probably each wife’s house) being located amid or beside its field.[317] Average field size was probably about one acre.[318] Drawings made by Champlain show fields fenced with parallel poles placed upright in the manner of a low stockade.[319] It was in these summer villages that the Wampanoags spent the most time during the year.[320] Actually, a family might make one or two moves during the summer, although staying in the same general area. When the fields planted later in the season were too far away for convenience, the family would move into another house near the field they were currently cultivating. Another resident of southern coastal New England, the flea, sometimes prompted a shift in residence during the summer. Fleas lived in the dust in the houses, and when they became unbearable an Indian family would move to a fresh dwelling.[321]
Reports of visitors to the southern New England coast prior to the plague give the impression that settlements of the “summer village” type were strung out all along the coast.[322] Settlements apparently were variable in size.[323] Writers who made this observation may have been looking both at actual variation in total group size and at seasonal variation in population concentration and dispersal. The most concentrated settlements were the winter villages.[324] A longhouse in one of the winter villages might shelter 40 or 50 people; there is no indication as to the number of longhouses that might have been found in such a village.[323]