The walls are laid in irregular courses, mortar being sparingly used. The addition of plastering to the outside and inside of the house awaits some future time, though sometimes work on the outside coat is put off to an ever vanishing mañana. When the house walls, seven or eight feet in height and of irregular thickness from seventeen to twenty-two inches are completed, the women begin on the roof. The beams are laid across the side walls at intervals of two feet; above these and parallel with the side walls are laid poles; across these is placed a layer of rods or willow brush, and above this is piled grass or small twigs. A layer of mud comes next, and when this is dry, earth is placed on it and tramped down until hard. The roof, which is complicated and ingenious, is nearly level, but provision is made for carrying off the water by means of spouts.
When the roof is finished the women put a thick coating of mud on the floor and plaster the walls. At Zuñi floors are nearly always made of slabs of stone, but in Hopi mud is the rule. The process of plastering a floor is interesting to an onlooker. Clay dug from under the cliffs, crushed and softened in water and tempered with sand is smeared on the floor with the hand, a little area at a time. The floor may be dry and occasionally the mud gets too hard; a dash of water corrects this. When the mud dries to the proper stage, it is rubbed with a smooth stone having a flat face, giving the completed floor a fine finish like pottery. As an extra finish to the room a dado is painted around the wall, in a wash of red ocher by means of a rabbit skin used as a brush. Formerly a small space on the wall was left unplastered; it was believed that a kachina came and finished it, and although the space remained bare it was considered covered with invisible mud.
Before the house can be occupied the builder prepares four feathers for its dedication. He ties the nakwakwoci or breath feathers to a willow twig, the end of which is inserted over one of the central roof-beams. The builder also appeases Masauah, the God of Death, by an offering in which the house is “fed” by putting fragments of food among the rafters or in a niche in the door lintels, beseeching the god not to hasten the departure of any of the family to the underworld. At the feast of Soyaluna in December, the feathers, forming the “soul” of the house, are renewed, and at this season when the sun returns northward, the village house-chief visits the houses which have been built within the year and performs a ceremony over them.
A hole is left in one corner of the roof, under which the women build the mud fireplace, with its knob andirons and the column of pots with the bottoms knocked out which form the chimney. Over the fireplace, a chimney hood, usually supported on posts, is constructed of basket-work, plastered over with mud. A row of mealing stones slanted in sunken stone boxes in the floor must not be forgotten, and no one in Hopiland could set up housekeeping without a smooth stone slab to bake piki upon. Some of the houses have a low bench along one or two sides of the room which forms convenient seats. The windows are small, being often mere chinks, through which the curious spy without being seen. Stones are usually at hand, by means of which, and mud, windows and doors may be closed when the family go off on a rather protracted stay.
This one-room house is the nucleus of the village. When the daughters marry and require space for themselves, another house is built in front of and adjoining the first one, and a second story may be added to the original house. Thus the cluster grows, and around the spaces reserved for streets and plazas other clusters grow until they touch one another and rise three or four stories, the inner rooms being dark from the addition to the later houses and these become storage places.
While the old houses were entered from the trapdoors in the roof, the new houses have doors at the ground level and often windows glazed in the most approved style. Frequently in the march of progress doors are cut into the old houses, and the streets begin to assume the appearance of a Mexican town; but the old nucleus buried under the successive buildings rarely shows and may be traced with difficulty. In winter the people withdraw from the exposed and retire to the old enclosed rooms, huddling together to keep warm, enlivening the confinement with many a song, legend, and story.
So much for the woman builders of Tusayan, to whom all honor.[1]
[1] One who desires to pursue this subject in more detail should consult Mindeleff’s paper on Pueblo Architecture in the 8th Annual Report Bureau American Ethnology, 1886-1887.