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.
Fig. 36. Wall decorations in Mashongnavi executed in pink on a white ground.
In addition to the above-mentioned uses of stone and earth in the masonry of house walls, the pueblo builders have employed both these materials in a more primitive manner in building the walls of corrals and gardens, and for other purposes. The small terraced gardens of Zuñi, located on the borders of the village on the southwest and southeast sides, close to the river bank, are each surrounded by walls 2½ or 3 feet high, of very light construction, the average thickness not exceeding 6 or 8 inches. These rude walls are built of small, irregularly rounded lumps of adobe, formed by hand, and coarsely plastered with mud. When the crops are gathered in the fall the walls are broken down in places to facilitate access to the inclosures, so that they require repairing at each planting season. Aside from this they are so frail as to require frequent repairs throughout the period of their use. This method of building walls was adopted because it was the readiest and
least laborious means of inclosing the required space. The character of these garden walls is illustrated in [Pl. XC], and their construction with rough lumps of crude adobe shows also the contrast between the weak appearance of this work and the more substantial effect of the masonry of the adjoining unfinished house. At the Cibolan farming pueblos inclosing walls were usually made of stone, as were also those of Tusayan. [Pl. LXX] indicates the manner in which the material has been used in the corrals of Pescado, located within the village. The stone walls are used in combination with stakes, such as are employed at the main pueblo.