Judging from the number of ruins in the Southwest, it might be thought that the former inhabitants spent much of their time in laying up walls and considered the work easy. What these ruins do show in an emphatic way is the organization of the builders and what mutual aid will accomplish. Dismiss the idea of the modern architect, builder, laborers, brick makers, planing mill hands, plumbers, etc., combining to get ready a dwelling for a family, and substitute in their place all the Indian relatives, from the infant to the superannuated, lending willing hands for the "raising." The primitive architect is there, builders too, of skill and experience and a full corps of those who furnish builders' supplies, including the tot who carries a little sand in her dress and those who ransack the country round for brush, clay, beams, stones, and water. Before going farther it must be understood that house-building is women's work among the Hopi, and these likewise are the house-owners. It seems rather startling, then, that all the walls of the uninhabited houses and the fallen walls of the ruins that prevail in the Southwest should be mainly the work of women's hands, whose touch we might expect to find on the decorated pottery, but not on the structures that cause the Pueblo people to be known as house-builders. From this one begins to understand the importance of woman in these little nations of the desert. Let us suppose that an addition is to be made to a Hopi village of a house containing a single room, built without regard to the future additions which may later form a house cluster. The plan of such a house would be familiar to any Hopi child, since it is merely a rectangular box. When the location has been determined, word is passed around among the kinsfolk and the collection of stones, beams, etc., is begun. Cottonwood trees for many miles around are laid under contribution. Some beams may be supplied from trees growing nearby along the washes and in the cornfields, and some may require journeys of eighty or a hundred miles, representing immense labor. Beams are precious, and in this dry climate they last indefinitely, so that one may not be surprised to find timber in the present houses from Awatobi or older ruins, or from Spanish mission times. It is also probable that often when pueblos were abandoned, they were revisited later and the timbers torn out and brought to the new location, thus the ruins might appear more ancient than they really are. With the advent of the burro, the horse, and the iron axe, timbering became easier than in the stone age, but it was still no sinecure.