CHAPTER VIII

SHELTERS, DWELLINGS, AND ARCHITECTURE

The Amerind of North America has generally been considered a shiftless and indolent being, but the preceding pages have shown, I think, that this estimate is an error, and the following chapters, together with the present one, will even more conclusively demolish that false assumption. The Amerind to be sure was not a white man, but it must not be forgotten that the constant holding of the white man’s nose to the grindstone is not so commendable as it is often said to be, for it is not choice with him but necessity born of his ways of living and his great numbers. Put him in comparatively small numbers on a vast continent rich and fertile and abounding in game, and it is not likely that he would shut himself up in a factory or in an office, where he is only a counting machine. The Amerind was as industrious as his environment demanded. Doubtless had his development not been interfered with by the Discovery, he might have arrived in time at the same condition of pressure that compels us to labour incessantly.

Almost everywhere on this continent are discovered numerous evidences of Amerind industry and toil. From the brush shelter of the Pai Ute of Arizona to the vast stone structures, richly ornamented, of Yucatan, is an immense range, and within these limits are to be found about every kind of a refuge from the elements that mankind has been able to devise. Mud, boughs caves, wood, adobe, stone, ice, snow, wicker-work, wattling, skins, in fact, every material and every possible hole, existing in nature, have been utilised by the Amerind, and the materials have been given every variety of shape. In nothing, perhaps, has his struggle with environment, and the moulding effects of the environment, been more clearly exhibited than in the forms and materials of the dwellings he has been compelled to invent. Other evidences of his perseverance and exertion are discerned in great aqueducts, in long irrigating canals, in reservoirs, in huge earthworks, and enormous mounds that sometimes rival in magnitude the giant constructions of Egypt.

The Amerind dwellings may be divided into three general classes,—temporary, portable, and fixed. The two classes, temporary and fixed, only are usually recognised by ethnologists, but it has seemed to me proper to add the third class, because of the wide use of the portable tipi, and other forms of tent. The temporary houses, those abandoned on moving camp and seldom occupied again, may be represented by the Pai Ute wikiup; the portable, carried from place to place for years, by the tipi of the Dakotas; the fixed, or those which are occupied either for an extended period or periodically, by the stone or adobe house of the Pueblos, or the wood house of the Iroquois, or the wood and earth house of the Eskimo.[170]

[Illustration: PAI UTE WIKIUPS, NORTHERN ARIZONA

From photograph by the Colorado River Expedition, 1872 ]

Outside of a natural cave or rock shelter, the wikiup of the Pai Ute exhibits about the lowest type of house used by man. It is said the chimpanzee makes a rude hut of boughs and branches, but even that could scarcely be less simple than the Arizona wikiup. This is composed merely of several branches arranged in a semi-circle, or rather more than a semi-circle, eight or ten feet in height, their tops together, and covered with boughs of cedar or pine or any other convenient brush. About one third of the circumference is open to the south, and opposite this side the fire is built a few feet away. The Pai Ute is surrounded by remains of excellent stone dwellings constructed long ago by Amerinds who are believed to be of the same general stock, but he has never tried to improve his wikiup of his own accord. The Utes, his kindred on the north, live in good tipis, but the Pai Ute appears never to have noticed the fact. The Mokis, also allied to him, live not far to southward in excellent houses, yet he has never attempted to emulate them.

[Illustration: MOKI KISI CONSTRUCTION]

In the kisi construction of the Mokis we may perhaps see the beginning of even the wikiup. The kisi is a sort of windbreak and sun-shelter lightly constructed of boughs and made in two ways, one called kishoni, being simply poles stuck in the ground in the arc of a circle with the concave side towards the north, and interlaced with twigs and branches to form a shade. The other kind is built by planting several posts with crotches at their tops in the ground in the form of a parallelogram and laying other posts or poles across from crotch to crotch and covering these with poles to form a platform or roof. Against the whole, on the south side, poles and branches are erected to form a shade. These affairs are put up in the fields to protect the crop tenders when there is no convenient cliff or ledge whereon to erect a better structure of stone. Doubtless out of these shelters, now seen in the field structures, originally grew the firm adobe and stone house, by one step or improvement after another, and probably all house construction had some such simple beginning. In a forested area, however, the easy construction of a comfortable house out of poles and bark would delay any development of a durable stone or adobe structure; the adobe, indeed, would not be durable in a humid climate. Protection and subsistence dictated the region a tribe or a stock should occupy, and the region usually determined the character of the house or shelter. House building, in its beginnings, is largely a result of environment, and was developed or modified accordingly. The tribes that were compelled to live in a sterile, dry country, where game and wood were both scarce, were forced to provide themselves with different food and different shelter from those which occupied a well-wooded country abounding in game. A few skins and poles, in the latter case, would quickly produce a house. In the arid region, however, man was not provided with such convenient material. His shelter from the sun cost him much labour and he was obliged to transport his necessary wood long distances. Additions to the shade to make it more comfortable were therefore obtained by piling up stones or scraping together the mud after a rain, and these operations being repeated, a development of skill was the inevitable result; skill which eventually produced a wall all round the sun-shelter, with the beams of the latter resting upon them instead of upon posts.

[Illustration: PRIMITIVE AMERIND LADDERS]

[Illustration: A NAVAJO HOUSE]

It seems, therefore, altogether probable that stone and mud house building originated in arid regions; but in a region treeless, like our great plains, the inevitable outcome in the line of a shelter was the portable tipi (teepee), because there bison hides were at hand for covering, but poles of the proper sort were difficult to secure and were carried along. In the forest, neither portable tents nor stone houses were necessary. It would only be when population was dense enough to destroy the game and timber, or when a people were forced to an arid region, that the stone house would develop. The Iroquois was a forest Amerind, and he built a house of wood that was excellent in construction and answered his purpose admirably. The Navajo occupying an arid region has been content with a rude shelter of boughs and branches or with boughs or poles covered with mud. They have never profited by the example of their Moki neighbours, and built substantial houses,—one reason, and the chief one, being that their habit of never occupying again any shelter where death has occurred has precluded it, for they do not care to bestow great labour on a structure that they may be called upon any time to abandon. There are then other causes besides ability, or inability, to build substantially that determine the character of the Amerind house.

[Illustration: A SWEAT HOUSE]

Bandelier states that the Pimas “dwelt in scattered hamlets, the houses of which combine to-day the mud roof of a typical New Mexican pueblo with the temporary framework of frail branches characteristic of the roaming savage.”[171] The roof is dome-shaped, but it is similar in material to the Pueblo mud roof, so that there we have a sort of a cross between the Moki field shelter, already mentioned, and the Navajo hut or hogan. The stock from which the present Pimas descended are supposed to have built the remarkable structure in Arizona known as _Casa Grande_, found in ruins by the first explorers. Tribes alter their methods of building, either from summer to winter or at different epochs. The Omahas at one time made lodges of wood, at another of earth, and at still another time they dwelt in tipis of skin. If a stone-house-building tribe should migrate to a region where neither loose flat stones nor adobe clay could be readily obtained, they would be forced to use timber.[172] The Zuñi languages and traditions point to the occupancy by the Pueblos in early times of brush houses like those of the Pai Utes. The Mohaves live in low huts of branches covered with mud.

The communal principle of living pervaded America and largely determined the size and character of the dwellings. A number of families usually lived together, in the same house, or in a group of rooms or houses. The “long-house” of the Iroquois, called by them _hodénosote_, and the clustered fortress-houses of the Pueblos, are good examples of the results of the practice of the communal principles adhered to by most of the Amerinds. It is also believed by some of the best authorities, like Bandelier and Morgan, that the Mexican and Mayan houses were largely due to the same cause.

Among the Omahas the tipis were usually grouped according to gentes.[173] Tipi and wigwam are frequently used by us as synonymous, and in some dictionaries a picture of a tipi is made to represent a wigwam.[174] This is an error due to unfamiliarity with different forms of Amerind dwellings. The tipi is generally a portable structure while the wigwam is always fixed, and the latter is also of a different shape. Tipi is a Dakota term and wigwam is Algonquin. Tipi is really the plural for “house,” the singular being “ti,” and “pi” a termination indicating plurality.[175] It is constructed by arranging a number, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, long poles, previously tied together near their tops, in a circle of about ten or fifteen feet diameter. This conical frame is then covered with bison hides sewed together in one sheet, or in modern days with canvas, shaped properly and laced or pinned together along the middle third of the junction of the covering mantle. The upper third is left loose, and its pointed ends are extended up and out by means of outside poles stuck into pockets in their extreme upper corners, according to the direction of the wind, to let the smoke escape from the fire built in the middle of the interior. If the wind blows straight at these flaps they are brought close together. Sometimes an extra skin is adjusted at the top so that it can be placed on any side to accomplish this object. The lower third is left open for a doorway, another skin being adjusted before it with a stick to spread it near its upper end, which end is attached to the tent. The bottom of the tent cover is held down by stakes or pins driven into the ground. In case of high winds, stones or other weights are placed on the bottom edge of the skins to keep them down. In summer the Omahas, and other tribes of the Dakotas, erected, when convenient, an elliptical lodge covered with bark, the roof being rounded and the construction being generally similar to the Algonquin elliptical wigwam. It was not more than seven feet high, while the tipi is twelve to twenty or more. These tribes also sometimes built earth lodges, chiefly for summer use, the roofs of which resembled in construction those of the Pueblo houses, though they were conical. A number of posts were set up in the ground to support in their crotches the transverse beams upon which numerous slender poles, about two inches in diameter, were laid to reach almost to the top where a hole for the exit of smoke was left. Against the outer series of posts all around slabs of wood were set up and the whole was then covered with earth a foot or two thick after matting and a layer of grass, or grass alone, was placed on the rafters or roof poles. This lodge was circular, the roof being conical, and it was entered through a covered way about ten feet long and five feet wide, the outer opening of which was protected by hanging bison hides. The supporting poles or posts were arranged in two concentric circles, in large lodges, the inner set being higher than the outer. Compartments within opening toward the fire were formed of willow matting, or skins.

[Illustration: AN OMAHA TIPI]

The regular tipi was decorated in accordance with tribal customs. Dorsey has published some careful notes on this as on other matters connected with the tribes of the Dakota stock, and Catlin has also given descriptions. The decorations were often the result of a vision. If a man had a vision of the aurora he depicted it on his robes and tent, the latter having a band of paint around the bottom, above which was a zigzag border from which, on one side, three stripes were drawn to the top of the tent, four on the other, and one in the rear. If he had a vision of the night or of some other “superterrestrial object, he blackened the upper part of his tent and a small portion on each side of the entrance.” Sometimes a star was also indicated, and night was represented by a black band above the middle or at the bottom. A tent similar to the Dakota tipi is in wide use among the Amerinds. Morgan states that the Dakotas were living in bark-covered houses when first discovered, in villages, in the present state of Minnesota, and that when they were driven “upon the plains by an advancing white population, but after they had become possessed of horses, they invented a skin tent eminently adapted to their present nomadic condition. It is superior to any other in use among the American aborigines from its roominess, its portable character, and the facility with which it can be erected and struck.”[176] While this is probably accurate as concerns the Dakotas, it is likely that other tribes invented a similar tent for themselves, before the appearance of the Dakotas on the plains.[177] Three tipis among the Omahas were sacred, and sheltered three sacred objects, the Sacred Pole, the Sacred White Buffalo-Cow Skin, and the Sacred Bag. These are all now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge. They were built like the common tipi.

[Illustration: A SEMINOLE DWELLING]

The wigwam of the Algonquins was built in two general ways, using bark or mats for covering. One form is made by planting elastic poles in the ground and bringing their tops together, and binding the whole with horizontal poles. It is unlike the tipi, because it is not portable, because the poles are flexible, and because the sides curve out from bottom to top instead of being straight lines. It is covered with birchbark. It is from ten to sixteen feet in diameter on the ground, and from six to ten feet high. The fire was built, as in the tipi, in the middle of the floor in a slight depression, and the usual outlet for smoke was left at the top. “Such a lodge,” says Morgan, “would accommodate, in the aboriginal plan of living, two and sometimes three married pairs with their children.”[178] The Menominee-Algonquin form of wigwam was made by planting in the ground about three feet apart, approximating the form of an ellipse, strong saplings some two inches in diameter, leaving at each end an opening for a doorway. The poles are then bent over toward each other and tied in an arch with strips of bark. Horizontal poles are tied on to the upright ones for stiffening, and the frame is then covered with bark or mats overlapping each other like shingles. The usual smoke outlet is left in the top. A mat curtain takes the place of a door. There were seldom, or never, regular doors in any Amerind houses on the continent before the Discovery, the opening being closed by curtains or mats. Another Menominee shelter, described by Hoffman, was made by “putting five or six saplings on each side of a parallelogram; the ends are left open, and the top of each sapling on a given side is then bound down over its opposite fellow to form a roof somewhat resembling a wagon-top. Horizontal saplings are then bound around the framework to make the structure secure, and over all are laid, longitudinally, a series of long strips of pine bark the upper pieces overlapping those below, while a large piece is placed over the highest part of the roof, which thus sheds the rain or melting snow.... The bedding is spread on the ground and usually covers the entire floor.”[179]

The eastern portion of the continent below Labrador, being well-forested, the Amerind houses there appear to have been entirely of wood, or sometimes of wood and mud combined. For this reason nothing of any of them, except occasional earth rings, is to be found and, so far as remains of houses are concerned, our wonderful, surpassing Moundbuilders appear to have had no houses. Turning to other Amerinds, however, who occupied the country when the whites arrived, we glean a fair idea of what the houses of the Mississippi valley may have been at their best. They varied in design in the same locality, of course, according to the tribe, in the same way that I have mentioned that in the South-west we find to-day Amerinds living in the most primitive form of dwelling not many miles away from others living in high types.

Some of the Mississippi valley houses were doubtless excellent structures though built of wood, or of wattling plastered with mud. Many of the mounds, squares, and circles were connected with buildings, generally forming the foundations for dwellings or other structures as in other parts of the continent.[180] In other words, they were often platforms for houses. The reasons for building a house on a platform raised above the surrounding lands might be many; one simple one was a desire to keep the floor dry in wet weather. The floor was earth, and earth on a level during long rains got uncomfortably damp if not wet. It would be natural in building, after such lessons, to elevate the floor of the house, which was done by rearing a platform of earth. This gave good drainage, and besides in a malarial region would be more healthful, and furthermore added to the defensive qualities. The habitations being built upon platforms, it would not do to build sacred structures on low ground. Man seldom looks down upon his spiritual constructions. Hence the higher the sacred building could be placed, the more sacred it seemed, and the huge flat-topped mounds of the Mississippi valley and Mexico were the result. Some of the Florida Amerinds were still living in dwellings reared on platforms of this kind, and so were others in the Southern United States, at the time of the first visits of the whites. The mounds, as a rule, are on the bottom lands along river courses, though in places where there are higher terraces these have frequently been chosen. Thomas quotes the following passage from Garcilasso: “The town and the houses of the cacique Ossachile are like those of other caciques in Florida.... The Indians try to place their villages on elevated sites; but inasmuch as in Florida there are not many sites of this kind where they can conveniently build, they erect elevations themselves in the following manner: They select the spot and carry there a quantity of earth, which they form into a kind of platform two or three pikes in height, the summit of which is large enough to give room for twelve, fifteen, or twenty houses, to lodge the cacique and his attendants. At the foot of this elevation they mark out a square place, according to the size of the village, around which the leading men have their houses.... To ascend the elevation they have a straight passageway from bottom to top, fifteen or twenty feet wide. Here steps are made by massive beams, and others are planted firmly in the ground to serve as walls. On all other sides of the platform the sides are cut steep.”[181] Thomas quotes further from Garcilasso: “The chief, whose name was also Guaxule, came out with five hundred men to meet him and took him in the village (pueblo) in which were three hundred houses, and lodged him in his own. This house stood on a high mound (cerro) similar to others we have already mentioned. Round about was a roadway sufficiently broad for six men to walk abreast.”[182] Again he quotes Le Page Du Pratz, who visited the Natchez in 1720: “As I was an intimate friend of the sovereign of the Natchez he showed me their temple, which is about thirty feet square, and stands on an artificial mount about eight feet high, by the side of a small river.”[183] There was also still another reason for building on mounds or elevated platforms; the reason, or at least one great reason, why the Mayas and Mexicans built on them, namely the desire to protect the foundations. In Louisiana the Taensas, in the time of La Salle, built of “sun-baked mud mixed with straw, arched over with a dome-shaped roof.”[184] Now a structure of this kind if reared on ordinary ground would soon be destroyed by the rains and moisture sapping its foundations, but by placing it on an elevated platform, where its footing would be comparatively dry, it would endure a long time. A sacred house would be likely to be so placed, if not others.

[Illustration: MISSISSIPPI VALLEY METHOD OF USING JACAL CONSTRUCTION, ACCORDING TO THOMAS]

[Illustration: CLIFF OUTLOOK, CANYON DEL MUERTO, ARIZONA]

Every tribe had some kind of a sacred structure, the Omahas carrying from place to place the three sacred tents referred to. The sacred structures, too, were generally of the same style as the house of the chief. Each village of the Natchez had a house devoted to the dead, besides others dedicated to different sacred objects. The death-house was oval, “having a circumference of one hundred feet—a simple hut without a window, and with a low and narrow opening on the side for the only door.”[185] Here were “garnered the choicest fetiches of the tribe, of which some were moulded from clay and baked in the sun. There, too, were gathered the bones of the dead; there an undying fire was kept burning by appointed guardians as if to warm and light and cheer the departed.”[185] “Hard by the temple, on an artificial mound of earth, stood the hut of the Great Sun; around it were grouped the cabins of the tribe.”[185]

It seems unnecessary to give any further space to show that the mounds that have aroused so much discussion and romantic writing were, many of them, the foundations for various structures reared by Amerinds as we know them.

Morgan advanced a theory that the hollow square earthworks were the foundations for long buildings, at one and the same time dwellings and a part of the defences, the interior area being used for a work place, children’s playground, etc. Many Algonquin houses were made of a parallelogram shape, with straight sides about eight feet high and a rounded roof. These houses were fifty or more feet long, and the matting with which they were covered could be readily removed to let in the sun and air. As a rule the villages were surrounded by palisades. The Iroquois, as well as most other Amerinds, lived in permanent villages, which were at first stockaded. They used three kinds of houses; a triangular lodge made of poles with bark for a covering, used in hunting, and the _ganosote_ or smaller bark house constructed in the same way as the third kind, the _hodénosote_ or “long-house,” which was built to accommodate a number of families. This was sometimes a hundred feet long, and from it came the name _Hodenosaunee_ by which the great League of the Five (Six) Nations was known to the world and to themselves. It was made by planting poles in the ground and binding others across them to make a strong frame of the shape of a parallelogram, upon which a roof of triangular pattern was built out of poles covered with bark. Sometimes the roof was round like that of many Algonquin tribes, and that of the ganosote was very frequently round. The height of the sides was about ten feet. The ganosote was about fifteen by twenty feet and fifteen feet high, with inside a kind of double berth built against the longer walls like the berths in a ship. It would accommodate eight persons. The entrance was closed by skins or by bark hung on wooden hinges. The covering was bark held in place by an outer set of poles tied through to the inside ones. The long-house was divided into a number of chambers six or eight feet wide with a passageway through all from end to end where the doors were. “Between each four apartments, two on a side, was a fire-pit in the center of the hall, used in common by their occupants.... Raised bunks were constructed around the walls of each apartment for beds.”[186] These structures constituted the village which was surrounded by a palisade, sometimes a double or triple row. The houses were placed without arrangement; and when the league grew powerful the palisade was dispensed with. The Lenapé “constructed small wattled huts with rounded tops thatched with the leaves of the Indian corn or with sweetflags.... In summer light brush tents took the place of these.”[187]

[Illustration: HALL OF COLUMNS, MITLA

Holmes’s Archæological Studies in Mexico

Photograph by A. V. Armour ]

[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTION (SOMEWHAT GENERALISED) SHOWING CONSTRUCTION OF PALENQUE BUILDINGS, YUCATAN

_f_, trefoil opening through medial wall; _g_, _h_, two principal varieties of roof comb

W. H. Holmes ]

[Illustration: SOME DETAILS OF PUEBLO HOUSE ARCHITECTURE

A TRIANGULAR SIPAPU OR SACRED KIVA ORIFICE

PUEBLO ROOF CONSTRUCTION

SOME MOKI ROOF DRAINS ]

On the North-west coast the native houses are usually built of cedar slabs. These slabs are split out of the wide trees[188] and the walls are obtained by securing them in an upright position to a frame about ten feet high. On this rests the roof of split shakes, bark, or boards, laid on rafters which are supported in the middle by two long, heavy beams, running the entire length of the house, and themselves borne up by four huge posts, often carved with totemic emblems. The general outward appearance of these houses is much like an ordinary low one-story house or barn of our own, except that in the middle of the roof there is a large square hole for a smoke outlet, the fire being made on a patch of sand or earth that forms a square about nine by ten feet in the middle of the room, the size depending on the dimensions of the house. They are usually about thirty or forty feet square,[189] the interior forming one large room, sometimes having a platform on one or two sides or all the way round about six feet wide and two feet high. This is divided by thin partitions into small compartments, which are covered about six feet above the floor with a ceiling of thin boards. A curtain in front makes a room of it. These houses vary somewhat in the different localities, but the type is about the same from the Puget Sound region to Yakutat Bay. Some of the Sound Amerinds give but one pitch to the roof. Many of the natives now build a house of sawed materials and roof it with shingles so that their modern villages, like the one at Sitka, present outwardly few Amerind signs, as they usually have chimneys, too, instead of smoke holes. Where they have the latter, boards are stuck up above the ridge to form a windbreak, or a more perfect arrangement for preventing back draught is applied in the shape of a large solid shutter so pivoted in the middle line that it can be tilted from one side of the ridge to the other. Among some tribes there are several smoke holes with adjustable boards that can be worked from below with a pole. The entire front gable of a chief’s house or an assembly house is often ornamented with a huge totemic design, painted on smooth boards that fill the whole space. In front of the house stood the tall pole bearing the totems of the inmates carved, one above another, with a full relief totem adorning the top. Small houses were built to hold the boxes containing the ashes of the dead, and the roof was sometimes surmounted with a totem carved in wood, or the totem was erected on a small pole nearby, or placed under the roof.

[Illustration: MOKI NOTCHED DOORWAY, SO MADE THAT LARGE BUNDLES COULD BE TAKEN IN

The transom was probably at first a smoke outlet ]

In all the constructions of the Amerinds of the North-west coast we perceive the powerful influence of surroundings on a primitive people. The region abounds in superb cedars with a grain so fine and straight that the logs can be readily split into slabs a couple of inches thick, that are admirable material for building purposes. Then there are plenty of young straight hemlocks, firs, and cedars for rafters and framework, so that these Amerinds, like those of the cliff region of the South-west, had their building material almost ready made. Being largely fishermen, they were not well supplied with skins, so that it was not easy to make pole lodges covered with them, as was the case with many Amerinds of the interior, where trees were absent or hard to split and where skins were plenty.

[Illustration: A ZUÑI CHIMNEY, MOKI THE SAME]

[Illustration: ONE FORM OF MOKI CHIMNEY HOOD]

In California a variety of houses was built, as there are many different stocks and conditions. The Yokuts made them of tule mats in the shape of an “A” tent with a door at the front. A half dozen or more of these were placed in a row and above them a flat sun-shelter of branches laid on a platform of poles supported by crotched posts set in the ground. Others build a hut of slabs or bark brought to a point and open on one side, like a tipi cut in two. Others again live in wikiups made by covering a square framework with boughs, leaving one side open. When the side of an Amerind hut is left open in this way, the opening always faces the south, except in hot weather, when it generally faces the other way. Another California tribe lives in earth lodges entered from the top through a hole or hatch with steps on the outside. This lodge was made by excavating a couple of feet and putting this earth on the covering framework, for a roof. In the mountains where wood was plenty they frequently used no earth at all, showing how quickly they adapted themselves to circumstances. The Modoc “excavates a circular space from two to four feet deep, then erects over it a rounded structure of poles and puncheons, strongly braced up with timbers, sometimes hewn and squared. The whole is warmly covered with earth, and an aperture left atop, reached by a centre pole. Before the coming of the whites secured them against the constant assaults and incursions of their enemies, their dwellings were slighter, consisting generally of a frame of willow poles, with tule matting overspread.”[190] Another tribe of the Pacific Slope, the Makhelchel, build cabins “of slender willow poles set upright in the ground, with others crossing them horizontally, forming a square lattice-work.”[191] The Yokaya have a lodge or dwelling composed of a “huge framework of willow poles covered with thatch, and resembling a large flattish haystack.” The Karok “excavate a round cellar, four or five feet deep and twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. Over this they build a square cabin of split poles or puncheons, planted erect in the ground and covered with a flattish puncheon roof. They eat and sleep in the cellar ... and store their supplies on the bank above next to the walls of the cabin.”[192] The Maidu make a hut of slabs placed together in something the shape of a tipi, with a low, square projection for an entrance.

Passing northward to the Aleuts, we find “houses built with the floor somewhat below the level of the outside soil, the walls of whale-ribs, sticks of wood, or upright stone walls, covered outside with mats, straw and finally turf.... The roof was formed by arching whale-ribs, or long sticks of driftwood, matted, thatched, and turfed like the sides, with a central aperture. A platform, somewhat raised, around the sides of the house afforded a place for sitting and sleeping. Later each village had a large house or _kashim_, which served as a common work-shop, and a lodging for strangers, as well as for a town-hall for their discussions and festivals.... Still later, in a period not greatly antedating the historic, the Aleuts began to build large communistic dwellings with features peculiar to themselves, without doors, and entered by the hole in the roof, the inmates descending on a notched log placed upright. These large yourts were divided, by partitions of wood, stone, or matting, into small rooms like the state-rooms of a steamer, but without doors; open toward the center of the yourt, and each accommodating one family.”[193]

It will be noted that we have again changed materials of construction; and why? Because the Aleutian Islands are devoid of timber, devoid of good building stone that an Amerind could get at, and he resorted therefore to what there was—driftwood, whale-ribs, turf, etc.[194] The house called by the Russians _barabára_ seems to have been originally made of turf even to the roof, and I saw examples in the summer of 1899 at Unalaska and on St. Paul Island. The turf or sod was cut into slabs and laid up like stones.

[Illustration: GROUND PLAN OF ESKIMO SNOW IGLU]

Continuing northward we reach the vast treeless arctic regions, where cold is the great enemy, and the reader wonders what man can do here in the way of architecture. He has done considerable; amongst other things he devised the only true arch found on the continent, and constructed one of the most admirable and unique dwellings in the world. This he built out of the snow which fell about him and prevented him from securing other material. The invention of the snow house by the Eskimo, or Innuit, as they call themselves, was one of the greatest triumphs over environment man has ever accomplished. I refer, of course, to the perfected snow house, the dome-shaped _iglugeak_, commonly called by us _igloo_ or _iglu_. _Iglu_ is the Innuit generic term for “house,” the distinctive name for snow house being _iglugeak_. This snow house is begun by selecting a suitable deep drift that is compact enough to permit homogeneous blocks to be taken from it, with the snow-knife, which is a bone tool shaped like a short sword. Latterly steel saws are employed when they have them. In the pit formed by removal of blocks of snow the builder works at his walls, the bottom of the excavation finally forming the floor of the house. The first block is bevelled down to a wedge shape with the point toward the beginning, and the worker goes on round his circle, and when he comes again to the wedge his wall rises upon the first portion and continues thus in a spiral fashion to the top, constantly narrowing till at last one block fills the opening. It takes two to adjust this, though one may build a small house successfully to that last point. By building spirally and therefore continuously, there is always support on two sides for the last block laid. The edges are slanted at the same time to bring the tiers gradually toward the centre. Joints and holes are filled with snow, though a small hole is left at the top for ventilation. As the heating of this house is done with lamps there is little smoke. For camping purposes a small snow house is built, seven feet diameter and five feet high, in about two hours. When made for permanent use the house is about twelve feet high and fifteen feet diameter. Plenty of light comes through the snow, but a window of ice or seal intestine is often placed over the entrance, which is reached by a more or less extended passage, with vaults for storage, by the way.

[Illustration: SECTION OF SNOW IGLU]

But though this house is so cleverly built, and is warm, and proof against everything but mild weather, the Innuit, if he can, will build a permanent winter house of drift wood, stones, earth, and sod and whale-ribs. These from the outside look like mounds of earth, and as soon as warm weather comes are nothing but wet cellars, which the inhabitants quickly abandon for the time, erecting with their walrus and seal skins a summer tent, called a _tupek_ or _topek_. The Point Barrow tupek is something like a tipi, without a smoke hole, as the fire is built outside when they can secure wood to build one. All the Alaska Innuit now use canvas tents of the “wall” pattern, when they can procure them.

The Amerind of the interior of the northland, where timber grows, utilises it and the skins of the animals he kills. The Nenenot about Hudson Bay occupy, all the year round, a tent almost identical with the Dakota tipi.

[Illustration: AN ALASKA ESKIMO WINTER HOUSE, POINT BARROW

Interior and sections p. 221 ]

No construction on the continent shows more skill than the Innuit snow iglu. The winter houses, of snow or other material, are usually occupied by two or more families. Many interiors of snow houses are lined with the summer tent covering to prevent the drip of the walls from falling on the occupants.

[Illustration: INTERIOR GROUND PLAN OF A MOKI HOUSE]

As the polar regions developed the snow-house; forest regions, bark and mat houses; barren plains, portable tents; so arid regions, where disintegrating cliffs furnished an abundance of flat slabs of stone, evolved stone houses, and broad dry valleys or plains lacking cliffs, timber, or large game, but yielding good clay soil, produced houses of mud or adobe; or, according to conditions, such combinations of these materials as were easiest and most practicable. It is next in order to review the houses of the arid regions constructed of stone, adobe, jacal, cajon, pisé,[195] etc., and the cavate lodges. To do full justice to the subject of houses would require a separate volume, but enough may be given here to present a general view. The occupied villages of the South-western United States are similar to the ruins found throughout that region, and the cliff-dwellings, which some writers would clothe with mystery, as has been mentioned, were no more mysterious than the occupied dwellings of the Moki; or any other Pueblo village, which, fortunately, remains inhabited by the builders.[196] The cliff-dwellings were constructed in cliffs simply because it was expedient to build them there and not because the builders were a race apart from other Amerinds. The canyons where the cliff-dwellings occur have bottom lands that are fertile and easily irrigated, both by stream water, and after the Pueblo fashion, by guiding shower waters with hoes amongst the corn. This in itself was a sufficient object for building in the canyons, and the huge, natural conchoidal alcoves that occur in the faces of the prevailing formation were attractive places to build in for several reasons, one of which may have been protection from assault and the weather, and another the frequent presence of springs at the back of these cavities. These springs have almost vanished, in many cases have entirely disappeared, owing to slightly drier conditions now prevailing. But I have frequently noticed at the back part of many of the cavities that had no ruins, or few ruins, to cover it up, a moisture that might at times increase to a dripping, or even flowing, that would furnish enough water for the daily supply of a considerable Amerind village. The construction is the same as other Pueblo houses of stone.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF WOOD AND EARTH IGLU]

[Illustration: AN ALASKA ESKIMO WINTER HOUSE OF WOOD AND EARTH, POINT BARROW]

[Illustration: STONE STEPS AT ORAIBI]

The inhabited pueblos, like the ruins, usually consist of a number of rooms built adjoining or on top of each other, like a lot of square boxes placed in rows or in a pyramidal pile, or like a series of steps, with the total height at the back often straight down. One or two single-room houses are first built, and then additions are made from time to time till the pile grows to a considerable height; three or four stories.[197] Groups of these groups built near each other form courts between. The lower tier of rooms, in olden times, was not entered from the ground, but from the roof through a hatchway, a ladder leading up on the outside and down on the inside. The upper rooms, or houses, were entered from the roofs of the lower ones; that is, the roofs of the lower rooms formed the floors of the upper ones, and also balconies in front of the rooms. I occupied for a time one of these upper rooms in Tewa, on the “East Mesa” at the Moki towns, and I found the roof in front of my door a delightful place, commanding a view of the whole mesa and a hundred miles beyond. I could also reach the top of my house easily, by a sort of stairway formed on the edge of the prolonged wall that separated me from my neighbour, and as this was the summit of the village my view was superb. Such stairways are common in all the villages. The ladders by which the various roofs are reached are now much like our own, but rudely made, and the upper ends are often very long, extending in many cases far above the house-top. The walls, about a foot thick, are of stone slabs laid in adobe mortar, and are generally built up by the women, who take their own time to the work, adding a few stones whenever they feel like it. Beams of small tree-trunks, six to eight inches in diameter, form the basis of the flat roof.[198] They are laid across the top of the walls and the ends, if too long, usually allowed to project beyond. These are covered with smaller poles laid about a foot apart, and on these are spread slender willows or reeds, with a layer of grass or twigs next, on which a layer of adobe mortar is laid and earth trodden down on top till it is firm, when a finish is made with another coat of adobe mortar. A slight pitch is given to the roof. No plumb-line, level, or square was used by the Amerinds anywhere on the continent so far as is now known. Sometimes the floors are paved with irregular flat sandstone slabs, but in most houses the floor is formed by a coat of adobe mortar which is patched and renewed as needed. Moccasined feet are not hard on such a surface, but my heavy soled shoes were the despair of the owner of my habitation. The hand is used as a trowel. The chimney is usually at one corner, and did not exist in America previous to the sixteenth century. A hood is built down from the roof to within about three or four feet of the floor, to catch the smoke, and outside the chimney is built up about three feet, sometimes with stones, but more frequently with large earthen pots with the bottoms knocked out. The hood is formed of sticks plastered with adobe mortar. Doorways were formerly of the notched variety[199] closed by a curtain, and the hatchways were closed by a mat of reeds. In later times the doorways have become like our own, and doors, too, have been made out of sawed boards. My door at Tewa was hung on hinges and had a latch and string. Glazed windows have also been adopted in many houses. The Rio Grande pueblos are built of adobe bricks, and so, largely, is Zuñi, but there is little adobe in the Moki towns, except in the form of plaster and mortar. The Rio Grande pueblos were largely constructed of adobe when first visited in 1540. The Pueblo Amerind frequently abandoned his village for one cause or another and built a new one elsewhere, so while his village may be called a permanent one it was not much more so than villages of the Algonquins and Iroquois.

[Illustration: CLIFF-DWELLING, EASTERN COVE OF MUMMY CAVE, CANYON DE CHELLY, ARIZONA]

[Illustration: HOUSES IN WALPI, ONE OF THE MOKI TOWNS, ARIZONA

In this are well seen the plastered and unplastered walls of stone, the ladders of ascent, the “end wall” steps, the notched doorway, with transom, the projecting roof beams, a rabbit-skin robe hanging on the wall above the right-hand ladder, and also on the left the entrance to a passageway through to another court

Photograph by U. S. Geological Survey ]

[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF A GROUP OF CAVATE LODGES, ARIZONA]

[Illustration: PLAN AND SECTIONS OF A CAVATE LODGE]

[Illustration: DIAGRAM SHOWING POCKET AT BACK OF SOME CAVATE LODGES

It was probably a receptacle for water which dripped slowly from the rock in wet seasons ]

Besides houses, some of the Amerinds of the South-west dwelt in shelters excavated wholly or in part in the face of a cliff or mountain, or hill. There are four localities where these cavate lodges occur in numbers, the northern Rio Grande valley, the San Juan River valley, the San Francisco mountain region, and the Rio Verde valley in Arizona. There are in these places thousands of cavate lodges. They average in size two or three rooms, sometimes communicating by a ledge, sometimes, often, in fact, with excavated connections. Some of the Verde group[200] are cut back a long distance into the rock—forty or fifty feet. The rooms are both oblong and circular, about seven feet high and ten by seventeen feet in size, or eight or ten feet diameter, according to the shape. There were no chimneys, the fire-pits being near the entrances. Nor were there any windows, the doorway being the only opening to the outside. Floors were levelled by filling depressions with adobe clay and low ridges were built up of the same material, probably to keep the inmates off the bottom, which must have sometimes been damp. Poles or willows laid across the ridges with skins on them would have made a flooring. Depressions at the back walls appear to have been made to hold water, and doubtless at times there was a “seepage” of considerable amount, as I have suggested regarding the open conchoidal caves occupied by the Cliff-dwellers. What appear to be stepping-stones are found in some entrances, as if water at times flowed out. The Verde group are in a soft grey sandstone, the Rio Grande in tufa, the San Francisco in cinder hills. These cavate dwellings are simply another form of Amerind residence due to necessity or expedience.[201] In other places there are some that were undoubtedly merely farming outlooks, occupied only during the crop season, just as there are cliff houses for this purpose, and also houses erected singly in open valleys. But many cavate lodges were actual residences for a period of years, owing to circumstances of one kind or another. The Cliff-dwellers may still be found among the Tarahumaris of northern Mexico. Schwatka describes some who “had walled up the outward face of a cave nearly to the top, leaving the latter for ventilation.” Many small cliff-dwellings in other places were so made to allow the smoke to escape. That is, the wall along the outer edge of the cavity was not carried quite up to the rock above, so that the smoke could drift out. There was, therefore, no roof over the dwelling, but it was sheltered by the overhanging rock. Many more examples of this adaptation of the dwelling to circumstances might be added.

There are ruins scattered all over the South-west, many of which were built by the same set of Amerinds, and do not represent a vanished population. Still, I believe that the population was at one time much greater than it was when our acquaintance with it began. Internecine wars resulting from a diminution of water-supply; diseases introduced by the whites; and also the attacks and absorption of tribes by the wilder Amerinds, being some of the causes of the diminution. It would not be possible to describe even all the prominent ruins here, but I will mention several. Beginning easterly of the Rio Grande, we find the Pecos Ruins first of importance. There are also remains of a large adobe Catholic church and a convent here, not finally and fully abandoned till about 1840. The ruins consist of two chief buildings on a low table, surrounded by an artificial wall. The buildings were in the form of rectangles, with courts within, one 55 by 440 feet, and the other 170 by 350 feet. In places, they were three or four stories high, terraced, Pueblo fashion. The construction was slightly different from the ordinary, as the upper floor and roof beams rested mainly on heavy upright posts set into the walls, and not directly on the walls themselves. The whole framework was thus independent of the enclosing walls, very much as our modern steel frame buildings are. The walls were of sandstone slabs, and were from one to two feet thick. Another group of important ruins, and about the finest specimens of the stone buildings of the ancient Pueblos, is that of the Chaco, in north-western New Mexico.[202] There are eleven chief ruins, and many smaller ones. The principal ruins were once houses three, four, or perhaps five stories high, all built of sandstone slabs and blocks obtained from the débris of the cliffs. Some of the walls are still standing to the height of thirty or forty feet. All are not uniform in the way the stones are laid, the variation being due to building at different times, and to a variation of the available supply of slabs. The stones were usually laid so closely, and so carefully chinked with spalls, that the outside of the walls resembles a smooth mosaic; though adobe mortar and rubble were freely used in the interior. Lintels, as was generally the case throughout America, were of wood. The date of the abandonment of these buildings is not known. They were first mentioned by Gregg, in 1844.[203]

[Illustration: THEORETIC ROOF CONSTRUCTION OF MITLA

W. H. Holmes ]

[Illustration: CEILING OR ROOF PLAN

GROUND PLAN OF A KIVA AND CEILING PLAN OF ANOTHER

The entrance is by ladder through the hole in the ceiling, which is also the smoke outlet. The floor is paved with slabs of stone, and is about 12 inches higher at the right-hand end. There are places on each side for the looms, blankets being woven in the kivas. The fireplace is the black square. At the left is the plank containing the sacred orifice called the sipapu. The foot of the ladder rests on the edge of the raised portion of the floor ]

[Illustration: CHACO RUINS MASONRY

From _Report_ of Hayden Expedition; 2 and 3 not found in modern Pueblo architecture ]

[Illustration: From Hayden _Report_]

There were many round towers of stone in the South-west, also the work of the Pueblos. Some stand alone but most of them are near other ruins. Often they were built with two or three concentric walls from two to five feet apart. A double-walled tower on the Mancos had an outer diameter of forty-three feet. Some of them may have been watch-towers, but those connected with other buildings were perhaps religious structures, or were used somewhat as the kiva[204] is to-day. The kiva is a room now usually square, in part, or wholly, below the general surface of the locality, used as a kind of club-house, council-house, lounging place, and meeting place for members of the society to which it belongs; and also a lodging place for the men; women are generally excluded. In Zuñi, the kivas are rooms on the ground floor. Many ancient kivas were round.

[Illustration: RUIN CALLED CASA GRANDE, ARIZONA]

Adobe brick and adobe clay in various forms were largely employed by the South-western and Mexican Amerinds, and there are evidences that some tribes in the Mississippi valley also used it. In the Rio Grande valley the adobe is made into large bricks, sun-dried and laid up with a mortar of the same material. Otherwise the villages are much the same as those described. One of the best modern examples of the adobe construction is the village of Taos in north-eastern New Mexico. (See illustration page 3.) Another method of employing adobe is seen in the famous ruin called _Casa Grande_, near Florence, Arizona, which our government recently repaired so that it will endure for a considerable time. This was made by the cajon method; that is, the adobe mud was rammed into large chests or boxes of wicker, without top or bottom, and when the material was sufficiently dried to hold its shape the frame was removed and the operation repeated till the wall was finished. The ruin referred to is only one of a number that were still standing in an area of about sixty-five acres in 1744, when Father Sedelmair saw them. He described the present ruin as having four stories, but only three are now distinguishable at the highest part. Its age is unknown. Its builders are supposed to have been the ancestors of the present Pimas, though probably there was considerable difference in the matter of culture. Father Kino, in 1694, was the first European to see the place and it was a ruin then. It was doubtless a communal dwelling like all the other large structures of the Amerinds of this region. Its size on the ground is forty-three by fifty-nine feet. Partitions three or four feet thick divide the interior into five rooms, the middle one having higher walls than the rest. The adobe blocks are two feet high, three to five long, and three or four across, and are almost as hard as sandstone while dry. There may have been upper stories of plastered wattled posts. Another famous ruin similar to this is the _Casas Grandes_ in Chihuahua, Mexico. It is built in much the same way as _Casa Grande_, and there are more buildings there standing. Probably there were at one time a great many structures of this kind in that region, and there may be others still standing in less explored parts. In the Salt River valley many of the buildings were of a somewhat different type again, as concerns their wall construction.[205] The Hemenway Expedition excavated a great many sites and found that the walls were often adobe rammed in between two series of posts wattled with reeds and cross-braced with sticks, the outer part of the wattled frames being plastered with adobe mortar. The thinner walls were constructed with only one line of wattled posts plastered on both sides, after the manner of the Mexican construction known as jacal, which is a set of poles fixed in the ground and then plastered on one or both sides with mud. The upper stories of some of the Rio Grande structures in the early times were made of wood probably plastered this way, which explains why in the southern part of New Mexico there are not now found higher standing walls of ruins or evidences of several stories.[206] Examples also have been seen in South-western Colorado, where a kind of wicker-work was built on the top of a wall and plastered on both sides. In the Salt River ruins the existence of the wood-work was indicated by the cavities left by its decay. There were also other structures built without the wattled frames. The cajon and pisé construction are very much alike, one being a Spanish and the other a French term, except that any pounded or rammed earth construction might be pisé, while the cajon is distinctly made by ramming earth into a box.[207] Therefore the _Casa Grande_ would be a clear example of cajon, while the Salt River construction of adobe rammed between the wattled frames would be pisé; and the plastered wicker-work would be jacal. The pisé and cajon method is very old all over the world. It is still to be found in France and England. In France the pisé box is about three yards long, one yard high, and about half a yard wide. The readiness with which the Amerind took advantage of his resources in the architectural line is again apparent in these great adobe structures of the Amerinds of northern Mexico and the South-western United States. It is not sensible, therefore, when some style of construction is discovered differing from that which we have been accustomed to see, to ascribe it to some mysterious race.

[Illustration: TRANSVERSE SECTION OF AN ORDINARY YUCATEC BUILDING

_f_, capstones of corbel vault; _l_, roof crest or comb. Such a building stood on the top of a mound

W. H. Holmes ]

[Illustration: W. H. Holmes

FORMS OF THE MAYA CORBEL VAULT]

In southern Mexico they erected extensive cities or pueblos because there they were more crowded together than anywhere to the northward, but these cities were essentially the same as the more simple towns in the northern country. At Tlascala “the houses were built, for the most part, of mud or earth; the better sort of stone and lime, or bricks dried in the sun. They were unprovided with doors or windows, but in the apertures for the former hung mats fringed with pieces of copper, or something which by its tinkling sound would give notice of anyone’s entrance. The streets were narrow and dark.”[208] This extract from Prescott might picture a New Mexican pueblo instead of one of the towns encountered by Cortez which have been often so romantically described. The copper on the mats was probably more for Amerind ornament than for the purpose stated by Prescott. While in some respects the Aztec towns may have been more elaborate than the New Mexican towns, there was probably not much difference in their method of construction. “The principal buildings and temples of the city were covered with a hard white stucco which glistened like enamel in the ... morning sun.”[209] This was perhaps a wash of gypsiferous clay similar to that used by the Mokis, or it may have been similar to the zahcab of the Mayas, which was a singular and abundant white earth used by them as a stucco. It was found in pockets.

[Illustration: GROUND PLANS OF YUCATEC BUILDINGS

W. H. Holmes ]

“The dwellings of the common people were also placed on foundations of stone which rose to the height of a few feet, and were then succeeded by courses of unbaked bricks, crossed occasionally by wooden rafters.”[210] These rafters were the projecting ends of the poles, as in the Pueblo country. The adobe houses in Mexico are now often built on stone foundations, for it is the foundation that is sapped and undermined by the rains. The upper walls of adobe stand well in a climate of that sort. Prescott says of the houses of the “dignitaries” and of the “principal nobles” that “They were low, indeed; seldom of more than one floor, never exceeding two. But they were spread over a wide extent of ground; were arranged in a quadrangular form, with a court in the centre,”[211] all of which sounds suspiciously like a communal dwelling, as Morgan maintains the Aztec houses were. The Aztecs were crowded around the lake of Mexico, and also built out over the water on piles. Houses raised above the water or ground were nothing unusual in America. Some of the North-west coast Amerinds built dwellings which were “raised and supported near thirty feet from the ground by perpendicular spars of very large size” with “access formed by a long tree in an inclined position from the platform to the ground, with notches cut in it by way of steps about a foot and a half asunder.”[212]

[Illustration: KWAKIUTL HOUSE FRONT

The thunder-bird lifting a whale. The beak was carved and fastened on

Construction: wood—split cedar planks, tree trunks, and poles. Site: edge of the sea ]

So far as the Aztec houses are concerned, “None of the Spanish descriptions,” asserts Morgan, “enable us to realise the exact form and structure.... But for the pueblos, occupied or in ruins, in New Mexico, and the more remarkable pueblos in ruins in Yucatan and Central America, we would know very little concerning the house architecture of the Sedentary Village Indians.”[213]

Morgan believes all were joint tenements, but in this he may be mistaken, for the life of the Aztecs seems to have passed to a point somewhat higher than that of the New Mexican Amerinds, and a further development of Aztec life certainly included a further development of their house-life also.

Within a day’s journey of the City of Mexico, Saville investigated some interesting ruins of an old “temple” erected, according to a tablet found there, in 1502, the signs on the tablet representing a rabbit and ten dots, or ten _tochtli_, corresponding to this date. It was built of rubble stone covered in many places inside with stone carving that had been painted.[214] There were also ornaments in stucco. The outer walls are nearly six feet thick. It is on the top of a high, cliff-like mountain difficult of access, near the Mexican town of Tepoztlan. Another splendid ruin near this is the Temple of Xochicalco. See illustrations, pages 23 and 31.

[Illustration: NORTH-WEST COAST HOUSES AND TOTEM POLES

Haida House

_p o p_ shifting wind break over smoke hole

End left open to show construction.

Dotted lines give section of floor.

_m_, totem pole; _c c_, bench; _b_, fireplace; _k_, smoke hole; _g g_, house posts ]

The greatest group of architectural remains on this continent is that of the Maya region, mainly in Yucatan. For a full description of many of these buildings the reader is referred again to the admirable work of Maudsley. The Mayas were the greatest architects as well as the greatest artists and greatest in almost everything of all the Amerinds, and if Goodman is correct in his rendering of some of their chronology they occupied the region more than ten thousand years.[215] Mound-like foundations supported the buildings, which generally rose as from a terrace, though sometimes the mound was very high and very steep, with small space around the building crowning it. At Copan,[216] which was in ruins before the Spaniards arrived, there is a great main terrace from which mounds rise, the latter bearing the buildings. The casing of the mound and the walls of buildings are of nicely dressed oblong stones usually without mortar. The joints were not broken here, nor in other Maya work. The mound slopes were terraced at five-foot intervals and the steps were about five feet high. The so-called “triangular arch” probably existed here as it did at the other Maya ruins. It was made by advancing the courses, several feet above the base of an opening, gradually toward each other till they met above, where a large slab was usually laid across to bind the whole together. The ceilings or roofs of many rooms in Maya ruins were wholly made this way. It has also been called a corbel arch, though it is, in fact, not an arch at all. See illustrations, pages 210, 235, and 237. There was no arch in Amerindian architecture besides the one the Eskimo constructed in his snow hut. The rooms are generally long and narrow in all the Maya structures and no windows existed. The Maya inability to span wide spaces was the cause of the narrow rooms and buildings. At Uxmal the two main rooms of the so-called Governor’s Palace are sixty feet long and only eleven to thirteen feet wide. The walls of all the structures are very thick, though certain walls, as the rear ones, are usually thicker than the others and have no openings, the latter, as a rule, being along one, two, or three sides. This was a probable survival of earlier defensive constructions similar to the communal fortresses of the Puebloan type as particularly exemplified in the ruins of the Chaco in New Mexico, where there were no rear openings. See ground plans, page 232. At Palenque are some fine examples of the Maya construction. The largest is called the palace and is 180 feet wide, 228 feet long, and 25 feet high, with fourteen doorways on the side and eleven at the ends. It was one story in height, as were all Maya buildings. There is a vast amount of carving and stucco modelling around them. One of the most unique constructions is that called the “Temple of the Cross,” number one, or two, or three, by different explorers, there being two structures much alike. See note 2, page 184. This is on top of a high mound, and is fifty feet front, thirty-one feet deep, and about forty feet high. The roof was something like our gambrel type, being the same all around without gables, with a level platform about three feet wide along the ridge, from which arose a peculiar stone and stucco, latticed, superstructure in two stories, the first about seven and the second about eight feet high. See illustrations, pages 210 and 235. There was abundant stucco ornamentation over the exterior, and on each side of the entrance was one of the figures referred to in the last chapter.

[Illustration: RUIN OF EAST FAÇADE AND IGLESIA, “PALACE” CHICHEN-ITZA, YUCATAN

Holmes’s _Archæological Studies in Mexico_ ]

[Illustration: ELEVATION OF KWAKIUTL HOUSE]

[Illustration: VIEW IN THE MOKI TOWN OF MISHONGNAVI, ARIZONA

Construction: stone slabs laid in adobe mortar. Site: barren summit of a mesa. The ladders were pulled up in time of danger ]

The mortar used is said to have been a cement made of one part slaked lime to two parts of zahcab. This was used by all the ancient Mayas and is used still in that country. It is, however, doubtful if slaked lime was known to the ancients. There is no evidence of it. At Mitla is yet another type of house ascribed to the Zapotecs.[217] It is in the Mexican State of Oaxaca. The human figures and animal carvings and forms seen in the Yucatan ruins are absent. The rooms are the same, long and narrow, with no openings except the doors. One of the most unusual features is a great hall 12 by 121 feet, with six round stone columns standing at intervals of about fifteen feet down the middle. See illustrations, pages 9 and 209. These average about twelve feet high and nine feet in circumference. The walls are forty-eight inches thick, of roughly broken stones laid in courses in plenty of adobe mortar, the outer parts of all the buildings being faced by slabs of stone containing the ornamentation, which is wholly geometrical. Some adobe brick walls are forty-six inches thick. The columns are out of the common because they are single stones, but built up piers are often used in Pueblo architecture, and the North-west coast Amerinds use the column in wood very frequently to support their large longitudinal rafters. One of these which I sketched in an Alaskan house at Cape Fox is given in the illustration, page 162. The roofs at Mitla were wooden beams covered with earth and stone slabs. See illustration, page 230. There are other ruins all through Honduras and Nicaragua and the rest of Central America. Squier says: “In Honduras, as also in San Salvador, I heard of remains and monuments equal to those of Copan in extent and interest.”

At the time the Spaniards came into Yucatan the Amerinds, according to Herrera, were dwelling in timber huts thatched with grass or something similar. The dense unexplored forests of the Yucatan region are filled with ruins which have never been seen by white men, at least that is the supposition of archæologists like Saville and Charnay. The Maya house was divided, according to Landa, from side to side by a wall with doors, the back part being sleeping quarters. The front portion was whitewashed or painted in designs and was open the whole length, with low sheltering eaves. In the rear there was a doorway leading from that part. A lengthwise division into two main parts was a characteristic of almost all the Maya buildings now found in ruins. The structures were generally wide and shallow, and subdivided into a great many rooms. It is more in the ornamentation of the buildings and the stone roofs than in anything else that they differ from structures farther north. The interior masonry is frequently a rubble, with the dressed and carved stones on the outside as a facing. Bandelier thinks that some of the stone walls in New Mexico are quite as well constructed as some in Mexico proper. But however this may be, there is nothing north of the City of Mexico that compares in architectural excellence with the Yucatan structures, albeit in some respects there is a strong resemblance between the latter in plan and conception, and the Pecos and other northern ruins.

The communal principle of living had much to do almost everywhere with the size and character of the Amerind houses. Situation was determined by expedience and necessity; material of construction by environment. Throughout the continent the Amerind was a village dweller, and except in the Far North and on the northern Californian and North-west coasts he was generally a tiller of the soil, growing, often in large quantities, maize, beans, squashes, cotton, and some other products according to locality. His large communal buildings were in part fortresses to protect the families against marauding Amerinds of a less prosperous and cultivated type, and against the occupants of other towns, for in general it may be said that there was little political cohesion in the various tribes, though the Aztecs and Iroquois are examples of exceptions that arose from time to time.

There is nothing in any of the remains, so far developed, that indicates foreign influence, prior to the Discovery. Every architectural work on the continent is purely Amerindian or modified by contact with other races subsequent to 1492.

[Illustration: ESKIMO HORN DIPPER]

[Illustration: HORN ARROW STRAIGHTENER]

##