These buildings express the communal thought of the builders, since they were constructed by groups of people rather than by individuals. Architecture representing the thoughts of many minds is conservative, or less liable to innovation or departure from prescribed forms and methods. These community houses express the thought of men in groups at different times, and, so far as archeology teaches, are the best exponents of what we call contemporary social conditions, while pottery and other small portable objects, being products of individual endeavor, furnish little on social organization, or general cultural conditions of communities. Although determination of cultural areas built on identity of pottery often coincides with those determined by buildings, this is not always the case. Specialized culture areas determined by highly conventionalized designs on ceramics are localized, more numerous, and as a rule more modern. Hence a culture area determined by architectural features may include several subareas determined by pottery.
The author has thought it possible to differentiate two distinct epochs or phases of house building in the upper part of the San Juan drainage, viz. the early and the middle stages of development. There are included in the early condition certain crude architectural efforts similar to the non-Pueblos represented in regions adjoining the Pueblo area. This early condition, though not clearly defined, is beginning to be revealed by intensive studies of the so-called slab house dwellings and isolated brush houses. Evidences of this stage have been found in several localities, as on McElmo Bluff, or combined with walls of what may be called true pueblo buildings. The differences between some of the buildings of the early stage and those of the aborigines in southern California, or of the Utes and Shoshonean tribes, are slight; resemblances which point to relations are not considered in detail.
From their advance in house building, it has been commonly stated that the Pueblo people were either derived from Mexican tribes or, as was customary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to suppose, their descendants had made their way south and developed into the more advanced Mexican culture as the Aztecs. These conclusions are not supported by comparison with available architectural data observed among these two peoples. The basal error is the mistake in considering the earth houses of the Gila the same as pueblos. The habitations of the Gila compounds were structurally different from pueblos, and their sanctuaries or ceremonial rooms had not the same form or relation to the dwellings. The Gila compounds are allied to Mexican buildings; but there is little in common between them and pure pueblos. The same is true of the type of stone dwellings on the Verde, Tonto, and Little Colorado. Certain likenesses exist between the Casas Grandes of the Gila and those of Mexico, although little relationship exists between the temples or ceremonial buildings of the valley of Mexico and the Casas Grandes of the Gila. The architecture of the Pueblos and the Aztecs is very different; the habitations of Mexican tribes resemble those of the Gila. The forms[55] of ceremonial chambers differ, one being rectangular mounds or pyramids, the other circular, generally subterranean.
Rather than seek the origin of the house builders of the San Juan, or the parent Pueblos, from Mexican sources, the author believes the custom of building stone houses in the pueblo region was not derived from any locality not now included in the pueblo area, but it developed as an autochthonous growth, the earliest stages as well as the most complex forms being of local origin. Incoming Indians may have introduced ideas of foreign birth but they did not bring in the mason’s craft. That custom developed in the Southwest, where we find the whole series from a single stone-house or a cave with walls closing the entrance to the most highly developed architectural production north of Mexico. There are cliff-dwellings in many other localities in the world but there are nowhere, except in the region here considered, cliff-dwellings with circular kivas constructed on this unique plan. It is generally supposed that a type of room called “small house” was the predecessor of the multiple community dwelling throughout the Southwest. This type, defined as a simple four-walled, one story building with a flat roof, is widely spread in New Mexico and Arizona. The strongest arguments in favor of its greater antiquity are possibly its simplicity of form and the character of accompanying ceramics—corrugated, black-and-white, and red pottery. Characteristic small houses of the Mesa Verde and McElmo Canyon belong to the same type of pueblo as the largest extensive villages which are more complicated than the so-called small house. It is what the author has called the pure type which is structurally different from the “small house,” the so-called archaic form of the mixed pueblos of the Rio Grande. This unit type is likewise unlike the small house of the Little Colorado, including those of the Zuñi Valley and the Hopi Wash, although the Hopi kivas show the influence of the Mesa Verde culture in the persistence of the ceremonial opening in the floor called the sipapu.
A cluster of small houses or the village such as we find at Mummy Lake on the Mesa Verde is composed of several scattered members, each containing for the religious and secular life the “pure type” rooms constructed on the same plan. In a village like the Aztec Spring House several unit buildings are united, forming one community house larger than the rest, which was the dominant one of the village, the remaining houses being smaller and scattered. Aztec Spring, Mitchell Spring, and Mud Spring villages show a similar consolidation of units with outlying smaller houses, and the number of units in such a union is believed to be indicated by the number of circular rooms, or kivas. Thus, four kivas might be supposed to indicate four consolidated social units.
The complete concentration of several unit pueblos into one or more large communal buildings[56] is also found in several cases in the area we have studied, but we must look to the great ruin at Aztec or those on the Chaco Canyon for examples of almost complete amalgamation. Thus these large pueblos where an almost complete consolidation has occurred have resulted from a fusion or condensation of what might have formerly been a rambling village composed of several separate units. This clustering of small separated houses in a village is not peculiar to the San Juan but exists elsewhere in the Southwest, as in the Rio Grande region, where, however, the structure of each component small house is different. These separate mounds do not indicate the unit type as defined, and the Rio Grande pueblo of modern date has its kiva separated from the house masses, which have grouped themselves in rectangular lines or rooms surrounding courts. There are, perhaps, examples in this region where a circular kiva is found embedded in house masses, but these are so few in number that they may possibly be regarded as incorporate survivals due to acculturation.
In the Gila Valley compounds, as Casa Grande, and on the Little Colorado, the unit type is unknown. Several blocks of buildings on the Gila are surrounded by a rectangular wall which is wanting in ruins of the Little Colorado and its tributaries. Here one of the units may be enlarged, following in some respects the conditions at Aztec Spring Ruin. A surrounding wall also appears in some of the Pueblo villages and pueblos, but when we compare one of the units of a Casa Grande compound with that of a Montezuma Valley village, we find little in common, the main difference, so far as form is concerned, being the absence of a circular kiva.[57] There is nothing in a Gila Valley compound we can structurally call a circular kiva, and no morphological equivalent of the circular kiva in ruins on the tributaries of the Salt and Gila. On the horizon of the Gila culture area there are no circular kivas, due to acculturation. There are rooms analogous to kivas used for ceremonials at Hopi and Zuñi, but they are not true kivas as we have interpreted them in the San Juan area. Both Hopi and Zuñi are composite people and have elements derived from Gila and Pueblo influences, but neither belong to the pure type in the sense the author defines it.
The author has attempted to show that the structure of the houses whose clustering composes villages in the Montezuma Valley is the same as that of Far View House of the Mummy Lake village on top of Mesa Verde; and that these architectural resemblances are close enough to indicate that the villages of the two localities were inhabited by people of the same general culture. He has proved that the pure type of such a village as shown in Far View House was constructed on the same plan as a cliff-dwelling, notwithstanding one is built in the open, the other in a cave. The geographic extension of this type has been traced into Utah. Ruined pueblos on the Chaco Canyon or at Aztec on the Animas, which is geographically nearer the Mesa Verde, are more concentrated but indicate the same culture. Renewed research is necessary to determine the southern and western extension of the pure type; the northern and eastern horizon is fairly well known.
Granting that the great ruins on the Chaco Canyon belong to the same people as those on Mesa Verde, the question arises, Which buildings are the most ancient, those on the Mesa Verde or those on the Chaco? A correct answer to this question should reveal the cradle of the culture indicated by the pure or prehistoric type of pueblo. The author believes that the pure pueblo culture originated in the northern part of the area and migrated southward to the Chaco Valley in prehistoric times, ultimately affecting the people of the Rio Grande, where sedentary people no doubt lived before written history of the area began. The result was a mixture; the mixed population are the modern Pueblos.
In the great cliff-houses of the Mesa Verde and the extensive pueblos of the McElmo we find towers combined with pure types of pueblos, either simple or complex. In the Chaco ruins these towers are not found in this combination. To this may be added the great house type of the McElmo, also absent in the Chaco. Here there appears to be an essential difference on which the author ventures a suggestion, but which future research must elucidate.