Fig. 35. An unplastered house wall in Ojo Caliente.
The stonework of this village, perhaps approaches the ancient types more closely than that of the others, some of the walls being noticeable for the frequent use of long bond stones. The execution of the masonry at the corners of some of the houses enforces this resemblance and indicates a knowledge of the principles of good construction in the proper alternation of the long stones. A comparison with the Kin-tiel masonry (Pl. LXXXIX) will show this resemblance. As a rule in pueblo masonry an upper house wall was supported along its whole length by a wall of a lower story, but occasional exceptions occur in both ancient and modern work, where the builders have dared to trust the weight of upper walls to wooden beams or girders, supported along part of their length by buttresses from the walls at their ends or by large, clumsy pieces of masonry, as was seen in the house of Sichumovi. In an upper story of Walpi also, partitions occur that are not built immediately over the lower walls, but on large beams supported on masonry piers. In the much higher terraces of Zuñi, the strength of many of the inner ground walls must be seriously taxed to withstand the superincumbent weight, as such walls are doubtless of only the average thickness and strength of ground walls. The dense clustering of this village has certainly in some instances thrown the weight of two, three, or even four additional, stories upon walls in which no provision was made for the unusual strain. The few supporting walls that were accessible to inspection did not indicate any provision in their thickness for the support of additional weight; in fact, the builders of the original walls could have no knowledge of their future requirements in this respect. In the pueblos of the Chaco upper partition walls were, in a few instances, supported directly on double girders, two posts of 12 or 14 inches in diameter placed side by side, without reinforcement by stone piers or buttresses, the room below being left wholly unobstructed. This construction was practicable for the careful builders of the Chaco, but an attempt by the Tusayan to achieve the same result would probably end in disaster. It was quite common among the ancient builders to divide the ground or storage floor into smaller rooms than the floor above, still preserving the vertical alignment of the walls.
Plate LXXXIX. Masonry in the north wing of Kin-tiel.
The finish of pueblo masonry rarely went far beyond the two leading forms, to which attention has been called, the free use of adobe on the one hand and the banded arrangement of ancient masonry on the other. These types appear to present development along divergent lines. The banded feature doubtless reached such a point of development in the Chaco pueblos that its decorative value began to be appreciated, for it is apparent that its elaboration has extended far beyond the requirements of mere utility. This point would never have been reached had the practice prevailed of covering the walls with a coating of mud. The cruder examples of banded construction, however—those that still kept well within constructional expediency—were doubtless covered with a coating of plaster where they occurred inside of the rooms. At Tusayan and Cibola, on the other hand, the tendency has been rather to elaborate the plastic element of the masonry. The nearly universal use of adobe is undoubtedly largely responsible for the more slovenly methods of building now in vogue, as it effectually conceals careless construction. It is not to be expected that walls would be carefully constructed of banded stonework when they were to be subsequently covered with mud. The elaboration of the use of adobe and its employment as a periodical coating for the dwellings, probably developed gradually into the use of a whitewash for the house walls, resulting finally in crude attempts at wall decoration.
Many of the interiors in Zuñi are washed with a coating of white, clayey gypsum, used in the form of a solution made by dissolving in hot water the lumps of the raw material, found in many localities. The mixture is applied to the walls while hot, and is spread by means of a rude glove-like sack, made of sheep or goat skin, with the hair side out. With this primitive brush the Zuñi housewives succeed in laying on a smooth and uniform coating over the plaster. An example of this class of work was observed in a room of house No. 2. It is difficult to determine to what extent this idea is aboriginal; as now employed it has doubtless been affected by the methods of the neighboring Spanish population, among whom the practice of white-coating the adobe houses inside and out is quite common. Several traces of whitewashing have been found among the cliff-dwellings of Canyon de Chelly, notably at the ruin known as Casa Blanca, but as some of these ruins contained evidences of post-Spanish occupation, the occurrence there of the whitewash does not necessarily imply any great antiquity for the practice.
External use of this material is much rarer, particularly in Zuñi, where only a few walls of upper stories are whitened. Where it is not protected from the rains by an overhanging coping or other feature, the finish is not durable. Occasionally where a doorway or other opening has been repaired the evidences of patchwork are obliterated by a surrounding band of fresh plastering, varying in width from 4 inches to a foot or more. Usually this band is laid on as a thick wash of adobe, but in some instances a decorative effect is attained by using white. It is curious to find that at Tusayan the decorative treatment of the finishing wash has been carried farther than at Zuñi. The use of a darker band of color about the base of a whitewashed room has already been noticed in the description of a Tusayan interior. On many of the outer walls of upper stories the whitewash has been stopped within a foot of the coping, the unwhitened portion of the walls at the top having the effect of a frieze. In a second story house of Mashongnavi, that had been carefully whitewashed, additional decorative effect was produced by tinting a broad band about the base of the wall with an application of bright pinkish clay, which was also carried around the doorway as an enframing band, as in the case of the Zuñi door above described. The angles on each side, at the junction of the broad base band with the narrower doorway border, were filled in with a design of alternating pink and white squares. This doorway is illustrated in Fig. 36. Farther north, on the same terrace, the jamb of a whitewashed doorway was decorated with the design shown on the right hand side of Fig. 36, executed also in pink clay. This design closely resembles a pattern that is commonly embroidered upon the large white “kachina,” or ceremonial blankets. It is not known whether the device is here regarded as having any special significance. The pink clay in which these designs have been executed has in Sichumovi been used for the coating of an entire house front.