Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines

by Lewis Henry Morgan

[Illustration: Fig. 56.—Cross-section through one apartment.]

Attention has been called to this pueblo, which would accommodate two thousand or more persons, for a special reason. It seems to furnish conclusive proof of the manner in which these great edifices were erected in order to construct the peculiar triangular stone ceiling, which is the striking characteristic of this architecture.

To understand the problem, the annexed cross-section of a single room will afford some aid by showing the relations of the walls to the chamber and its ceiling. The chamber, with its vaulted ceiling, was constructed over a solid core of masonry, laid simultaneously with the walls, which was removed after the latter had seasoned and settled. It tends to show that with small stones of the size used, about a foot long and six inches thick, the triangular ceiling as it projected toward the center in rising, required the interior support of a core to insure the possibility of construction by their methods. Once put together over such a core and carried up several feet above the top of the arch, the down weight of the superincumbent mass would articulate and hold the masonry together. It shows further that the essential feature of the arch is wanting in this contrivance.

The proof of this assertion is found in the actual presence of the unremoved core in one of these edifices in all of its apartments. Mr. Stephens found every room of the back building on the second terrace filled with masonry from bottom to top, left precisely as it was when the building was finished. He remarks that "the north half of the second range has a curious and unaccountable feature. It is called the Casa Cerrada, or 'closed house,' having ten doorways, all of which are blocked up on the inside with stone and mortar…. In front of several were piles of stones which they [his workmen] had worked out from the doorways, and under the lintels were holes through which we were able to crawl inside; and here we found ourselves in apartments finished with walls and ceilings like all the others, but filled up, except so far as they had been emptied by the Indians, with solid masses of mortar and stone. There were ten of these apartments in all, two hundred and twenty feet long and ten feet deep, which thus being filled up made the whole building a solid mass; and the strangest feature was that the filling up of the apartments must have been simultaneous with the erection of the buildings; for, as the filling in rose above the tops of the doorways, the men who performed it never could have entered to their work through the doors. It must have been done as the walls were built, and the ceiling must have closed over a solid mass." [Incidents of Travel, etc., ii, 22.]

It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Stephens that the masonry within each room was a core, without which a vaulted chamber in this form could not have been constructed with their knowledge of the art of building. It shows the rudeness of their mechanical resources as well as the real condition of the art among them, but at the same time increases our appreciation of their originality, ingenuity, and industry. They were working their way upward experimentally in architecture, as all other peoples have done, having richly earned the right to point with pride to these structures as extraordinary memorials of the progress they had made.

An important conclusion follows, namely, that this "closed house" was the last, in the order of time, erected in this pueblo, and had not been emptied of its core and brought into use when the Spanish irruption forced the people to abandon this pueblo. It would fix the period of its construction at or after A. D. 1520, thus settling the question of its modern date and removing one of the delusions concerning the antiquity of the ruins in Yucatan and Central America. This structure is as much decayed as any other in Yucatan. There are many other structures even better preserved than this.

A brief reference to Palenque will conclude this notice, but without dealing with the facts as fully as they deserve. There are four or five pyramidal elevations at this pueblo quite similar in plan and general situation with those at Uxmal. One is much the largest, and the structures upon it are called the "Palace." It has generally been regarded as the paragon of American Indian architecture. As a palace implies a potentate for its occupation, a character who never existed and could not exist under their institutions, it has been a means of self-deception with respect to the condition of the Aborigines which ought to be permanently discarded. Several distinct buildings are here grouped upon one elevated terrace, and are more or less connected. Altogether they are two hundred and twenty-eight feet long, front and rear, and one hundred and eighty feet deep, occupying not only the four sides of a quadrangle, but the greater part of what originally was, in all probability, an open court. The use of the interior court for additional structures shows a decadence of architecture and of ethnic life in the people, because it implies an unwillingness to raise a new pyramidal site to gain accommodations for an increased number of people. Thus to appropriate the original court so essential for light and air as well as room, and which is such a striking feature in the general plan of the architecture of the Village Indians, was a departure from the principles of this architecture. Nearly all the edifices in Yucatan and Central America agree in one particular, namely, in being constructed with three parallel walls with partition walls at intervals, giving two rows of apartments under one roof, usually, if not invariably, flat. Where several are grouped together on the same platform, as at Palenque, they are severally under independent roofs, and the spaces between, called courts, are simply open lanes or passageways between the structures. An inspection of the ground plan of the Palenque ruins in the folio volume of Dupaix, or in the work of Mr. Stephens, will be apt to mislead unless this feature of the architecture is kept in mind. There are in reality seven or eight distinct edifices crowded together upon the summit level of the platform. Mr. Stephens speaks of it as one structure. "The building," he remarks, "was constructed of stone, and the whole front was covered with stucco and painted…. The doorways have no doors, nor are there the remains of any…. The tops of the doorways were all broken. They had evidently been square, and over every one were large niches in the wall on each side, in which the lintels had been laid. These lintels had all fallen, and the stones above formed broken natural arches." [Footnote: Central America, &c., ii, 310-312.]

The interior walls in two rooms shown by engravings were plastered over. Architecturally, Palenque is inferior to the House of the Nuns; but it is more ornamental. It also has one peculiar feature not generally found in the Yucatan structures, namely, a corridor about nine feet wide, supposed to have run around the greater part of the exterior on the four sides. The exterior walls of these corridors rest on a series of piers, and the central or next parallel wall is unbroken, except by one doorway on each of three sides and two in the fourth, thus forming a narrow promenade. One of the interior buildings consists of two such corridors, but wider, on opposite sides of a central longitudinal wall. All the rooms in the several edifices are large. In one of the open spaces is a tower about thirty feet square, rising three stories. The Palenque structures are quite remarkable, standing upon an artificial eminence about forty feet high, and large enough to accommodate three thousand people living in the fashion of Village Indians.

The plan of these houses, as well as of those in Yucatan, seems to show that they were designed to be occupied by groups of persons composed of a number of families, whose private boundaries were fixed by solid partition walls. They are exactly adapted to this mode of occupation, and this special adaptation, so plainly impressed upon all this architecture, leads irresistibly to the conclusion that they were occupied on the communal principle, and were, consequently, neither more nor less than joint-tenement houses, of a model which may be called, distinctively, that of the American aborigines. None of these edifices are as large as those on the Rio Chaco, nor does either of them possess equal accommodations with the Pueblo Bonito, which possessed six hundred and forty rooms. [Footnote: Lieutenant Simpson's Report, Senate Ex. Doc., 1st Sess., 31st Congress, 1850, p. 81.]

But in this warm climate, and with the raised terraces used as gathering places, more persons could manage to live in equal spaces.