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
In the construction of the typical pueblo house the walls are carried up
to the height of the roof surface, and are then capped with a continuous
protecting coping of thin flat stones, laid in close contact, their
outer edges flush with the face of the wall. This arrangement is still
the prevailing one at Tusayan, though there is an occasional example of
the projecting coping that practically forms a cornice. This latter is
the more usual form at Zuñi, though in the farming pueblos of Cibola it
does not occur with any greater frequency than at Tusayan. The flush
coping is in Tusayan made of the thinnest and most uniform specimens of
building stone available, but these are not nearly so well adapted to
the purpose as those found in the vicinity of Zuñi.
Here the projecting stones are of singularly regular and symmetrical
form, and receive very little artificial treatment. Their extreme
thinness makes it easy to trim off the projecting corners and angles,
reducing them to such a form that they can be laid in close contact.
Thus laid they furnish an admirable protection against the destructive
action of the violent rains. The stones are usually trimmed to a width
corresponding to the thickness of the walls. Of course where a
projecting cornice is built, it can be made, to some extent, to conform
to the width of available coping stones. These can usually be procured,
however, of nearly uniform width. In the case of the overhanging
cornices the necessary projection is attained by continuing either the
main roof beams, or sometimes the smaller poles of the second series,
according to the position of the required cornice, for a foot or more
beyond the outer face of the wall. Over these poles the roofing is
continued as in ordinary roof construction with the exception that the
edge of the earth covering is built of masonry, an additional precaution
against its destruction by the rains. In many places the adobe
plastering originally applied to the faces of these cornices, as well as
to the walls, has been washed away, exposing the whole construction. In
some of these instances the face of the cornice furnishes a complete
section of the roof, in which all the series of its construction can be
readily identified. The protective agency of these coping stones is well
illustrated in Pl. XCVII, which shows the destructive effect of rain at
a point where an open joint has admitted enough water to bare the
masonry of the cornice face, eating through its coating of adobe, while
at the firmly closed joint toward the left there has been no erosive
action. The much larger proportion of projecting copings or cornices in
Zuñi, as compared with Tusayan, is undoubtedly attributable to the
universal smoothing of the walls with adobe, and to the more general use
of this perishable medium in this village, and the consequent necessity
for protecting the walls. The efficiency of this means of protecting the
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