A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities; Pueblo architecture
External use of this material is much rarer, particularly in Zuñi, where
only a few walls of upper stories are whitened. Where it is not
protected from the rains by an overhanging coping or other feature, the
finish is not durable. Occasionally where a doorway or other opening has
been repaired the evidences of patchwork are obliterated by a
surrounding band of fresh plastering, varying in width from 4 inches to
a foot or more. Usually this band is laid on as a thick wash of adobe,
but in some instances a decorative effect is attained by using white.
It is curious to find that at Tusayan the decorative treatment of the
finishing wash has been carried farther than, at Zuñi. The use of a
darker band of color about the base of a whitewashed room has already
been noticed in the description of a Tusayan interior. On many of the
outer walls of upper stories the whitewash has been stopped within a
foot of the coping, the unwhitened portion of the walls at the top
having the effect of a frieze. In a second story house of Mashongnavi,
that had been carefully whitewashed, additional decorative effect was
produced by tinting a broad band about the base of the wall with an
application of bright pinkish clay, which was also carried around the
doorway as an enframing band, as in the case of the Zuñi door above
described. The angles on each side, at the junction of the broad base
band with the narrower doorway border, were filled in with a design of
alternating pink and white squares. This doorway is illustrated in Fig.
36. Farther north, on the same terrace, the jamb of a whitewashed
doorway was decorated with the design shown on the right hand side of
Fig. 36, executed also in pink clay. This design closely resembles a
pattern that is commonly embroidered upon the large white “kachina,” or
ceremonial blankets. It is not known whether the device is here regarded
as having any special significance. The pink clay in which these designs
have been executed has in Sichumovi been used for the coating of an
entire house front.
[Illustration: Fig. 36. Wall decorations in Mashongnavi executed in
pink on a white ground].
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