Plate LXXXVI. A Zuñi interior.
This room is furnished with long, raised benches of masonry along the sides, a feature much more common at Zuñi than at Tusayan. Usually such benches extend along the whole length of a wall, but here the projection is interrupted on one side by the fireplace and chimney, and on the left it terminates abruptly near the beginning of a tier of mealing stones, in order to afford floor space for the women who grind. The metates are arranged in the usual manner, three in a row, but there is an additional detached section placed at right angles to the main series. The sill of the doorway by which this room communicates with an adjoining one is raised about 18 inches above the floor, and is provided with a rudely mortised door in a single panel. Alongside is a small hole through which the occupant can prop the door on the inside of the communicating room. The subsequent sealing of the small hand-hole with mud effectually closes the house against intrusion. The unusual height of this door sill from the floor has necessitated the construction of a small step, which is built of masonry and covered with a single slab of stone. All the doors of Zuñi are more or less raised above the ground or floor, though seldom to the extent shown in the present example. This room has no external door and can be directly entered only by means of the hatchway and ladder shown in the drawing. At one time this room was probably bounded by outer walls and was provided with both door and windows, though now no evidence of the door remains, and the windows have become niches in the wall utilized for the reception of the small odds and ends of a Zuñi household. The chimney of this house will be noticed as differing materially, both in form and in its position in the room, from the Tusayan examples. This form is, however, the most common type of chimney used in Zuñi at the present time, although many examples of the curved type also occur. It is built about midway of the long wall of the room. The Tusayan chimneys seldom occupy such a position, but are nearly always built in corners. The use of a pier or buttress-projection for the support of a roof girder that is characteristic of Tusayan is not practiced at Zuñi to any extent. Deer horns have been built into the wall of the room to answer the purpose of pegs, upon which various household articles are suspended.
The various features, whose positions in the pueblo dwelling house have been briefly described above, will each be made the subject of more exhaustive study in tracing the various modifications of form through which they have passed. The above outline will furnish a general idea of the place that these details occupy in the house itself.
[ KIVAS IN TUSAYAN.]
[General use of kivas.]—Wherever the remains of pueblo architecture occur among the plateaus of the southwest there appears in every important village throughout all changes of form, due to variations of environment and other causes, the evidence of chambers of exceptional character. The chambers are distinguishable from the typical dwelling rooms by their size and position, and, generally, in ancient examples, by their circular form. This feature of pueblo architecture has survived to the present time, and is prominent in all modern pueblos that have come under the writer’s notice, including the villages of Acoma and Jemez, belonging to the Rio Grande group, as well as in the pueblos under discussion. In all the pueblos that have been examined, both ancient and modern, with the exception of those of Tusayan, these special rooms, used for ceremonial purposes, occupy marginal or semidetached positions in the house clusters. The latter are wholly detached from the houses, as may be seen from the ground plans.
[Origin of the name.]—Such ceremonial rooms are known usually by the Spanish term “estufa,” meaning literally a stove, and here used in the sense of “sweat house,” but the term is misleading, as it more properly describes the small sweat houses that are used ceremonially by lodge-building Indians, such as the Navajo. At the suggestion of Major Powell the Tusayan word for this everpresent feature of pueblo architecture has been adopted, as being much more appropriate. The word “kiva,” then, will be understood to designate the ceremonial chamber of the pueblo building peoples, ancient and modern.
[Antiquity of the kiva.]—The widespread occurrence of this feature and its evident antiquity distinguish it as being especially worthy of exhaustive study, especially as embodied in its construction maybe found survivals of early methods of arrangement that have long ago become extinct in the constantly improving art of housebuilding, but which are preserved through the well known tendency of the survival of ancient practice in matters pertaining to the religious observances of a primitive people. Unfortunately, in the past the Zuñi have been exposed to the repressive policy of the Spanish authorities, and this has probably seriously affected the purity of the kiva type. At one time, when the ceremonial observances of the Zuñi took place in secret for fear of incurring the wrath of the Spanish priests, the original kivas must have been wholly abandoned, and though at the present time some of the kivas of Zuñi occupy marginal positions in the cell clusters, just as in many ancient examples, it is doubtful whether these rooms faithfully represent the original type of kiva. There seems to be but little structural evidence to distinguish the present kivas from ordinary large Zuñi rooms beyond the special character of the fireplace and of the entrance trap door, features which will be fully described later. At Tusayan, on the other hand, we find a distinct and characteristic structural plan of the kiva, as well as many special constructive devices. Although the position of the ceremonial room is here exceptional in its entire separation from the dwelling, this is due to clearly traceable influences in the immediate orograpic environment, and the wholly subterranean arrangement of most of the kivas in this group is also due to the same local causes.