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
modern Indians of Tusayan and Cibola have inherited much of this ancient
spirit; yet this industry was rarely diverted to the excavation of room
or village sites, except in the case of the kivas, in which special
motives led to the practice. In some of the Chaco pueblos, as now seen,
the floors of outer marginal rooms seem to be depressed below the
general level of the surrounding soil; but it is now difficult to
determine whether such was the original arrangement, as much sand and
soil have drifted against the outer walls, raising the surface. In none
of the pueblos within the limits of the provinces under discussion has
there been found any evidence of the existence of underground cellars;
the rooms that answer such purpose are built on the level of the ground.
At Tusayan the ancient practice of using the ground-floor rooms for
storage still prevails. In these are kept the dried fruit, vegetables,
and meats that constitute the principal winter food of the Tusayan.
Throughout Tusayan the walls of the first terrace rooms are not finished
with as much care as those above that face the open courts. A quite
smoothly finished coat of adobe is often seen in the upper stories, but
is much more rarely applied to the rough masonry of the ground-floor
rooms. At Zuñi no such difference of treatment is to be seen, a result
of the recent departure from their original defensive use. At the
present day most of the rooms that are built on the ground have external
doors, often of large size, and are regarded by the Zuñi as preferable
to the upper terraces as homes. This indicates that the idea of
convenience has already largely overcome the traditional defensive
requirements of pueblo arrangement. The general finish and quality of
the masonry, too, does not vary noticeably in different portions of the
village. An occasional wall may be seen in which underlying stones may
be traced through the thin adobe covering, as in one of the walls of the
court illustrated in Pl. LXXXII, but most of the walls have a fairly
smooth finish. The occasional examples of rougher masonry do not seem to
be confined to any particular portion of the village. At Tusayan, on the
other hand, there is a noticeable difference in the extent to which the
finishing coat of adobe has been used in the masonry. The villages of
the first mesa, whose occupants have come in frequent contact with the
eastern pueblo Indians and with outsiders generally, show the effect in
the adoption of several devices still unknown to their western
neighbors, as is shown in the discussion of the distribution of roof
openings in these villages, pp. 201-208. The builders of the first mesa
seem also to have imitated their eastern brethren in the free use of the
adobe coating over their masonry, while at the villages of the middle
mesa, and particularly at Oraibi, the practice has been comparatively
rare, imparting an appearance of ruggedness and antiquity to the
architecture.
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