Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines

by Lewis Henry Morgan

Outside the front wall closing the court, and about thirty feet distance therefrom, are the remains of a low wall crossing the entire front and extending beyond it. The end structures were about sixty-five feet long by forty feet wide, while at the center was a smaller structure, fifty-four feet long by eighteen wide. All its parts were connected. It was evidently erected for defensive purposes; but it is impossible to make out its character from the remains. One wing is several feet longer than the other, and the wall on the court side is about twenty feet longer than the opposite exterior wall, thus showing that they used no exact measurements.

There were no fire-places with chimneys in this structure. There are none in the ruins in Yucatan and Central America. It is a fair inference, therefore, that chimneys were entirely unknown to the aborigines at the time of their discovery. They have since that time been adopted into the old pueblo houses from American or Spanish sources. They are placed in one corner of the room. We saw recently at Taos two chimneys and two fire-places in one and the same room, one for cooking and the other for a fire to warm the room; proof conclusive that they were not to the chimney born. They were in an apartment of one of the principal chiefs.

In a number of rooms are recesses like niches left in the wall, about two feet six inches wide and high, and about eighteen inches deep. These furnished places to set household articles in, in the place of a mantel or shelf. We afterwards saw niches precisely similar at Taos, and thus used.

It remains to consider the number of rooms or apartments contained in this great edifice. It is plain that it was built in the terraced form, the second story set back from the first, the third from the second, and so on to the last, which was a single row of apartments, on the top somewhere, but not necessarily on the back side. Pueblos were not entirely uniform in this respect The edifice at Taos recedes in front and rear and even upon the sides. This may have been built in the same way, but it can neither be proved nor disproved from the ruins. The number of apartments would not vary much whether the upper stories were symmetrically or irregularly formed. If symmetrical, the main building contained two hundred and sixty apartments, and each wing seventy, making the computation for the latter by area and from the number of depression still discernible, thus making an aggregate of four hundred rooms.

The house was a fortress, proving the insecurity in which the people lived. It was also a joint tenement house of the aboriginal American model, indicating a plan of life not well understood. It may indicate an ancient communism in living, practiced by large households formed on the principle of kin. In such a case the communism was limited to the household as a part of a kinship.

Those familiar with the remains of Indian Pueblos in ruins will recognize at once the resemblance between this pueblo and the stone pueblos in ruins on the Rio Chaco, in New Mexico, about sixty miles distant from these ruins, particularly the one called Hungo Pavie, so fully described by General J. H. Simpson. There is one particular in which the masonry agrees, viz., in the use of courses of thin stones, about half an inch in thickness, sometimes three together, and sometimes five and six. These courses are carried along the wall from one side to the other, but often broken in upon. The effect is quite pretty. These stones measure six inches in length by one-half an inch in thickness. General Simpson found the same courses of thin stones, and even thinner, in the Chaco ruins, and comments upon the pleasing effect they produced.

This edifice was a credit to the skill and industry of the men among the Village Indians; for the men, and not the women, were the architects and the masons, although the women undoubtedly assisted in doing the work. Women brought stone and adobe and cedar, and made adobe mortar, without a doubt, as they still do. One of the hopeful features in their advancement was the beginning of the reversal of the old usage which put all labor upon the women. It is now the rule among the Village Indians for the men to assume the heavy work, which was doubtless the case when this pueblo was constructed. They cultivated maize, beans, and squashes, in garden beds, and irrigated them with water drawn from the river by means of a canal, and passed in several smaller streams through their gardens. The men now engage in the work of cultivation. This is a sure sign of progress.

Off the south wing of the building, and without it, are the remains of an additional building, large enough for twenty or thirty rooms on the ground, some part of which were, doubtless, carried up two or more stories high; but it is a mass of indistinct ruins, about which little can be said except that some of the rooms were unusually large. This may have been the first building constructed, and the one occupied while the stone pueblo was being built.

[Illustration: Fig. 43.—Outline of a Stone Pueblo on Animus River.]

This outline plan is submitted with some hesitation, because the sketch from which it is taken was made in haste, and with no expectation of using it. It is but an approximation. Near the pueblo last described, and about five hundred feet northeasterly therefrom, is another pueblo in two sections, Fig. 43, with a space about fifteen feet wide between them. They may have been, and probably were, connected and inhabited as one structure. Some of the walls are still standing, and a number of the rooms in the ground story are well preserved, the ceilings still remaining in place. Although the structure is chiefly of stone like the last, some of the walls are of cobblestone and adobe mortar. The largest section seems to have had an open court in the center in the form of a parallelogram. This feature increased the difficulty of understanding the original form of the house and the arrangement of the rooms. The walls of the first, of parts of the second, and occasionally of parts of the third story, are still standing in places. Many of the rooms are small, as the measurements of the following rooms in the second story of the smallest building of the two will show: