Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448Cushing, Frank Hamilton
History
Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-1892, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 321-448
Cushing, Frank Hamilton
Zuni mythology
The composite round and square pueblo ruin is not, however, confined to
this transitional type or to its comparatively restricted area wherever
occurring, but is found here and there as far northward, for instance,
as the neighborhood of older cliff ruins. But in such cases it seems
to have been developed, as heretofore hinted, in the comparatively
recent rebuilding of old rounded towns by square-house builders. Quite
in correspondence with all this is the history of the development,
from the round form into the square, of the kivas of the later Zuñi
towns; that is, like the towns themselves, the round kivas of the
earlier round towns became, first in part and then nearly squared in
the composite round and square towns, and finally altogether squared in
the square towns. This was brought about by a twofold cause. When the
cliff dwellers became inhabitants of the plains, not only their towns,
but also the kivas were enlarged. To such an extent, indeed, were the
latter enlarged that it became difficult to roof them over in the old
fashion of completing the upper courses of the walls with cross-laid
logs, and of roofing the narrowed apex of this coping with combined
rafter and stick structures; hence in many cases, although the round
kiva was rigidly adhered to, it was not unfrequently inclosed within a
square wall in order that, as had come to be the case in the ordinary
living rooms, rafters parallel to one another and of equal length might
be thrown across the top, thus making a flat roof essentially like the
flat terrace roofs of the ordinary house structure.
It is not improbable that the first suggestion of inclosing the round
kiva in a square-walled structure and of covering the latter with
a flat roof arose quite naturally long before the cliff dwellers
descended into the plains. It has been seen that frequently, in the
larger and longest occupied cliff-towns, the straight-walled houses
grew outward wholly around the kivas; and when this occurred the round
kiva was thus not only surrounded by a square inclosure--formed by the
walls of the nearest houses,--but also it became necessary to cover
this inclosing space with a flat roof, in order to render continuous
the house terrace in which it was constructed. Still, the practice
never became general or intentional in the earlier cliff-towns;
probably, indeed, it became so in the now ruined round towns only
by slow degrees. Yet it needed after this (in a measure) makeshift
beginning only such influence of continued intercourse between the
square-house building people and these round-town building people to
lead finally to the practical abandonment by the latter of the inner
round structure surviving from their old-fashioned kivas, and to make
them, like the modern Zuñi kiva, square rather than round.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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