The house being thus far completed, the builder prepares four feathers similar to those prepared by the chief, and ties them to a short piece of willow, the end of which is inserted over one of the central roof beams. These feathers are renewed every year at the feast of Soyalyina, celebrated in December, when the sun begins to return north ward. The builder also makes an offering to Másauwu (called “feeding the house”) by placing fragments of food among the rafters, beseeching him not to hasten the departure of any of the family to the under world.
A hole is left in one corner of the roof, and under this the woman builds a fireplace and chimney. The former is usually but a small cavity about a foot square in the corner of the floor. Over this a chimney hood is constructed, its lower rim being about 3 feet above the floor.
As a rule the house has no eaves, the roof being finished with a stone coping laid flush with the wall and standing a few inches higher than the roof to preserve the earth covering from being blown or washed away. Roof-drains of various materials are also commonly inserted in the copings, as will be described later.
All the natives, as far as could be ascertained, regard this single-roomed house as being complete in itself, but they also consider it the nucleus of the larger structure. When more space is desired, as when the daughters of the house marry and require room for themselves, another house is built in front of and adjoining the first one, and a second story is often added to the original house. The same ceremony is observed in building the ground story in front, but there is no ceremony for the second and additional stories.
Anawita (war-chief of Sichumovi) describes the house in Walpi in which he was born as having had five rooms on the ground floor, and as being four stories high, but it was terraced both in front and rear, his sisters and their families occupying the rear portion. The fourth story consisted of a single room and had terraces on two opposite sides. This old house is now very dilapidated, and the greater portion of the walls have been carried away. There is no prescribed position for communicating doorways, but the outer doors are usually placed in the lee walls to avoid the prevailing southwest winds.
| Fig. 19. A Tusayan wood rack. |
Formerly on the approach of cold weather, and to some extent the custom still exists, people withdrew from the upper stories to the kikoli rooms, where they huddled together to keep warm. Economy in the consumption of fuel also prompted this expedient; but these ground-floor rooms forming the first terrace, as a rule having no external doorways, and entered from without by means of a roof hatchway provided with a ladder, are ordinarily used only for purposes of storage. Even their roofs are largely utilized for the temporary storage of many household articles, and in the autumn, after the harvests have been gathered, the terraces and copings are often covered with drying peaches, and the peculiar long strips into which pumpkins and squashes have been cut to facilitate their desiccation for winter use. Among other things the household supply of wood is sometimes piled up at one end of this terrace, but more commonly the natives have so many other uses for this space that the sticks of fuel are piled up on a rude projecting skeleton of poles, supported on one side by two upright forked sticks set into the ground, and on the other resting upon the stone coping of the wall, as illustrated in [Fig. 19]. At other times poles are laid across a re-entering angle of a house and used as a wood rack, without any support from the ground. At the autumn season not only is the available space of the first terrace fully utilized, but every projecting beam or stick is covered with strings of drying meat or squashes, and many long poles are extended between convenient points to do temporary
duty as additional drying racks. There was in all cases at least one fireplace on the inside in the upper stories, but the cooking was done on the terraces, usually at the end of the first or kikoli roof. This is still a general custom, and the end of the first terrace is usually walled up and roofed, and is called tupubi. Tuma is the name of the flat baking-stone used in the houses, but the flat stone used for baking at the kisi in the field is called tupubi.
Kikoli is the name of the ground story of the house, which has no opening in the outer wall.