Bandelier National Monument, New MexicoWing, Kittridge A.
History
Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico
Wing, Kittridge A.
Bandelier National Monument (N.M.)
The harvesting of the corn by no means concluded the labors concerned
with it. A place of storage safe from rodents was a first requisite,
bringing about the building of tight-walled chambers both in the cliffs
and in the pueblo understory; then long grinding with stone metate and
mano on the part of the housewife was called for to convert the kernels
to cornmeal. One ancient use of this cornmeal no doubt is duplicated in
the modern Pueblo cooking of Piki—a thin crisp paperlike bread baked on
a hot stone griddle. Traces of such griddle-stoves are to be found in
some of the ancient pueblos.
[Illustration: _A modern Indian dance, with masked figures, as seen
by a Pueblo artist._
Photo of a sketch by Pablita Velarde.]
SHELTER. With his food needs taken care of, the new Frijoles resident
thought next of shelter from the weather. Either he organized with some
of his neighbors to construct a masonry dwelling in the traditional
style of the west country, or he took shelter in a natural cave of the
tuff cliff. In the latter case, a few days of scraping and chipping at
the soft rock would normally suffice to level off the floor and raise
the ceiling; final trimmings, such as fireplace and rocked-up doorway,
could be completed at leisure. As years passed and the family grew, it
may be assumed that the sooty cave became crowded and was supplemented
with rooms in front, built up from rock fragments lying close by,
mortared together with adobe from down the slope. For ceiling beams,
pinyons and junipers were large enough, since the span needed to be only
6 or 8 feet; even these small timbers were hard enough to cut and trim
with a stone axe. Above the beams, small sticks, mostly willow, were
tightly laid, then grass or bark was spread to take the final layer of
earth which weatherproofed the ceiling, or which made the floor for the
room above. The design of the ceilings in the modern buildings at
monument headquarters is of this type, a style of Pueblo architecture,
largely derived from ancient Indian models, which is commonly seen
throughout the Southwest.
It is uncertain which type of construction is the older—the talus house
or the open pueblo on the canyon floor. But one thing is evident—a
building of the size of Tyuonyi, previously described, was worked on and
occupied by scores of families. In troubled times, this massive
structure would have served better for mutual defense than scattered or
smaller houses.
The rock of which the Bandelier masonry walls were made is not an easy
material to build with. Unlike sandstone or even limestone, it refuses
to fracture into clean straight lines or right angles. To employ it as
building stone, the Indians had to find small miscellaneous blocks and
chip these odd pieces into some semblance of usable shape. This chipping
or pecking was done with hammerstones and axes of harder lava. The work
required to fashion the walls of Tyuonyi, crude though they are, must
have been prodigious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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