Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology: to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891
History
Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology: to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891
Navajo Indians -- Rites and ceremonies; Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities; Pueblo architecture
Aside from the tupubi, there are numerous small rooms especially
constructed for baking the thin, paper-like bread called piki. These are
usually not more than from 5 to 7 feet high, with interior dimensions
not larger than 7 feet by 10, and they are called tumcokobi, the place
of the flat stone, tuma being the name of the stone itself, and tcok
describing its flat position. Many of the ground-floor rooms in the
dwelling houses are also devoted to this use.
The terms above are those more commonly used in referring to the houses
and their leading features. A more exhaustive vocabulary of
architectural terms, comprising those especially applied to the various
constructional features of the kivas or ceremonial rooms, and to the
“kisis,” or temporary brush shelters for field use, will be found near
the end of this paper.
The only trace of a traditional village plan, or arrangement of
contiguous houses, is found in a meager mention in some of the
traditions, that rows of houses were built to inclose the kiva, and to
form an appropriate place for the public dances and processions of
masked dancers. No definite ground plan, however, is ascribed to these
traditional court-inclosing houses, although at one period in the
evolution of this defensive type of architecture they must have partaken
somewhat of the symmetrical grouping found on the Rio Chaco and
elsewhere.
LOCALIZATION OF GENTES.
In the older and more symmetrical examples there was doubtless some
effort to distribute the various gentes, or at least the phratries,
in definite quarters of the village, as stated traditionally. At the
present day, however, there is but little trace of such localization. In
the case of Oraibi, the largest of the Tusayan villages, Mr. Stephen has
with great care and patience ascertained the distribution of the various
gentes in the village, as recorded on the accompanying skeleton plan
(Pl. XXXVII). An examination of the diagram in connection with the
appended list of the families occupying Oraibi will at once show that,
however clearly defined may have been the quarters of various gentes in
the traditional village, the greatest confusion prevails at the present
time. The families numerically most important, such as the Reed, Coyote,
Lizard, and Badger, are represented in all of the larger house clusters.
[Illustration: Plate XLVIII. Adobe church at Hawikuh.]
_Families occupying Oraibi._
[See house plan--house numbers in blue.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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