Part 16 (1/2)
Perhaps the most noteworthy characteristic of pueblo masonry, and one which is more or less present in both ancient and modern examples, is the use of small c.h.i.n.king stones for bringing the masonry to an even face after the larger stones forming the body of the wall have been laid in place. This method of construction has, in the case of some of the best built ancient pueblos, such as those on the Chaco in New Mexico, resulted in the production of marvelously finished stone walls, in which the mosaic-like bits are so closely laid as to show none but the finest joints on the face of the wall with but little trace of mortar. The c.h.i.n.king wedges necessarily varied greatly in dimensions to suit the sizes of the interstices between the larger stones of the wall. The use of stone in this manner no doubt suggested the banded walls that form so striking a feature in some of the Chaco houses. This arrangement was likely to be brought about by the occurrence in the cliffs of seams of stone of two degrees of thickness, suggesting to the builders the use of stones of similar thickness in continuous bands. The ornamental effect of this device was originally an accidental result of adopting the most convenient method of using the material at hand. Though the masonry of the modern pueblos does not afford examples of distinct bands, the introduction of the small c.h.i.n.king spalls often follows horizontal lines of considerable length. Even in mud-plastered Zui, many outcrops of these thin, tabular wedges protrude from the partly eroded mudcoating of a wall and indicate the presence of this kind of stone masonry. An example is ill.u.s.trated in Fig. 34, a tower-like projection at the northeast corner of house No. 2.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 34. Stone wedges of Zui masonry exposed in rain-washed wall.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 35. An unplastered house wall in Ojo Caliente.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate LXVII. Nutria, plan.]
In the Tusayan house ill.u.s.trated in Pl. Lx.x.xIV, the construction of which was observed at Oraibi, the interstices between the large stones that formed the body of the wall, containing but small quant.i.ties of mud mortar, were filled in or plugged with small fragments of stone, which, after being partly embedded in the mud of the joint, were driven in with unhafted stone hammers, producing a fairly even face of masonry, afterward gone over with mud plastering of the consistency of modeling clay, applied a handful at a time. Piled up on the ground near the new house at convenient points for the builders may be seen examples of the larger wall stones, indicating the marked tabular character of the pueblo masons material. The narrow edges of similar stones are visible in the unplastered portions of the house wall, which also ill.u.s.trates the relative proportion of c.h.i.n.king stones. This latter, however, is a variable feature. Pl. XV affords a clear ill.u.s.tration of the proportion of these small stones in the old masonry of Payupki; while in Pl. XI, ill.u.s.trating a portion of the outer wall of the Fire House, the tablets are fewer in number and thinner, their use predominating in the horizontal joints, as in the best of the old examples, but not to the same extent. Fig. 35 ill.u.s.trates the inner face of an unplastered wall of a small house at Ojo Caliente, in which the modern method of using the c.h.i.n.king stones is shown. This example bears a strong resemblance to the Payupki masonry ill.u.s.trated in Pl. XV in the irregularity with which the c.h.i.n.king stones are distributed in the joints of the wall. The same room affords an ill.u.s.tration of a cellar-like feature having the appearance of an intentional excavation to attain a depth for this room corresponding to the adjoining floor level, but this effect is due simply to a clever adaptation of the house wall to an existing ledge of sandstone. The latter has had scarcely any artificial treatment beyond the partial smoothing of the rock in a few places and the cutting out of a small niche from the rocky wall. This niche occupies about the same position in this room that it does in the ordinary pueblo house. It is remarkable that the pueblo builders did not to a greater extent utilize their skill in working stone in the preparation of some of the irregular rocky sites that they have at times occupied for the more convenient reception of their wall foundations; but in nearly all such cases the buildings have been modified to suit the ground. An example of this practice is ill.u.s.trated in Pl. XXIII, from the west side of Walpi. In some of the ancient examples the labor required to so prepare the sites would not have exceeded that expended on the ma.s.sive masonry composed of numberless small stones. Many of the older works testify to the remarkable patience and industry of the builders in ama.s.sing and carefully adjusting vast quant.i.ties of building materials, and the modern Indians of Tusayan and Cibola have inherited much of this ancient spirit; yet this industry was rarely diverted to the excavation of room or village sites, except in the case of the kivas, in which special motives led to the practice. In some of the Chaco pueblos, as now seen, the floors of outer marginal rooms seem to be depressed below the general level of the surrounding soil; but it is now difficult to determine whether such was the original arrangement, as much sand and soil have drifted against the outer walls, raising the surface. In none of the pueblos within the limits of the provinces under discussion has there been found any evidence of the existence of underground cellars; the rooms that answer such purpose are built on the level of the ground.
At Tusayan the ancient practice of using the ground-floor rooms for storage still prevails. In these are kept the dried fruit, vegetables, and meats that const.i.tute the princ.i.p.al winter food of the Tusayan.
Throughout Tusayan the walls of the first terrace rooms are not finished with as much care as those above that face the open courts. A quite smoothly finished coat of adobe is often seen in the upper stories, but is much more rarely applied to the rough masonry of the ground-floor rooms. At Zui no such difference of treatment is to be seen, a result of the recent departure from their original defensive use. At the present day most of the rooms that are built on the ground have external doors, often of large size, and are regarded by the Zui as preferable to the upper terraces as homes. This indicates that the idea of convenience has already largely overcome the traditional defensive requirements of pueblo arrangement. The general finish and quality of the masonry, too, does not vary noticeably in different portions of the village. An occasional wall may be seen in which underlying stones may be traced through the thin adobe covering, as in one of the walls of the court ill.u.s.trated in Pl. Lx.x.xII, but most of the walls have a fairly smooth finish. The occasional examples of rougher masonry do not seem to be confined to any particular portion of the village. At Tusayan, on the other hand, there is a noticeable difference in the extent to which the finis.h.i.+ng coat of adobe has been used in the masonry. The villages of the first mesa, whose occupants have come in frequent contact with the eastern pueblo Indians and with outsiders generally, show the effect in the adoption of several devices still unknown to their western neighbors, as is shown in the discussion of the distribution of roof openings in these villages, pp. 201-208. The builders of the first mesa seem also to have imitated their eastern brethren in the free use of the adobe coating over their masonry, while at the villages of the middle mesa, and particularly at Oraibi, the practice has been comparatively rare, imparting an appearance of ruggedness and antiquity to the architecture.
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. Lx.x.xIX) 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 b.u.t.tresses 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, part.i.tions occur that are not built immediately over the lower walls, but on large beams supported on masonry piers.
In the much higher terraces of Zui, the strength of many of the inner ground walls must be seriously taxed to withstand the superinc.u.mbent weight, as such walls are doubtless of only the average thickness and strength of ground walls. The dense cl.u.s.tering 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 part.i.tion 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 b.u.t.tresses, the room below being left wholly un.o.bstructed. 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate LXVIII. Nutria, view.]
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 Zui 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 Zui housewives succeed in laying on a smooth and uniform coating over the plaster. An example of this cla.s.s 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 whitewas.h.i.+ng have been found among the cliff-dwellings of Canyon de Ch.e.l.ly, 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 Zui, 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 finis.h.i.+ng wash has been carried farther than, at Zui. 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 Zui 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 ill.u.s.trated 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Zui, located on the borders of the village on the southwest and southeast sides, close to the river bank, are each surrounded by walls 2 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 coa.r.s.ely 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 s.p.a.ce.
The character of these garden walls is ill.u.s.trated 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate LXIX. Pescado, plan.]
Small inclosed gardens, like those of Zui, occur at several points in Tusayan. The thin walls are made of dry masonry, quite as rude in character as those inclosing the Zui gardens. The smaller cl.u.s.ters are usually located in the midst of large areas of broken stone that has fallen from the mesa above. In the foreground of Pl. XXII may be seen a number of examples of such work. Pl. XCI ill.u.s.trates a group of corrals at Oraibi whose walls are laid up without the use of mud mortar.
Where exceptionally large blocks of stone are available they have been utilized in an upright position, and occur at greater or less intervals along the thin walls of dry masonry. An example of this use was seen in a garden wall on the west side of Walpi, where the stones had been set on end in the yielding surface of a sandy slope among the foothills.
A similar arrangement, occurring close to the houses at Ojo Caliente, is ill.u.s.trated in Pl. XCII. Large, upright slabs of stone have been used by the pueblo builders in many ways, sometimes incorporated into the architecture of the houses, and again in detached positions at some distance from the villages. Pls. XCIII and XCIV, drawn from the photographs of Mr. W. H. Jackson, afford ill.u.s.trations of this usage in the ancient ruins of Montezuma Canyon. In the first of these cases the stones were utilized, apparently, in house masonry. Among the ruins in the valley of the San Juan and its tributaries, as described by Messrs.
W. H. Holmes and W. H. Jackson, varied arrangements of upright slabs of stone are of frequent occurrence. The rows of stones are sometimes arranged in squares, sometimes in circles, and occasionally are incorporated into the walls of ordinary masonry, as in the example ill.u.s.trated. Isolated slabs are also met with among the ruins. At Kiakima, at a point near the margin of the ruin, occurs a series of very large, upright slabs, which occupy the positions of headstones to a number of small inclosures, thought to be mortuary, outlined upon the ground. These have been already described in connection with the ground plan of this village.
The employment of upright slabs of stone to mark graves probably prevailed to some extent in ancient practice, but other uses suggest themselves. Occupying a conspicuous point in the village of Kin-tiel (Pl. LXIII) is an upright slab of sandstone which seems to stand in its original position undisturbed, though the walls of the adjoining rooms are in ruins. A similar feature was seen at Peas...o...b..anco, on the east side of the village and a short distance without the inclosing wall.
Both these rude pillars are, in character and in position, very similar to an upright stone of known use at Zui. A hundred and fifty feet from this pueblo is a large upright block of sandstone, which is said to be used as a datum point in the observations of the sun made by a priest of Zui for the regulation of the time for planting and harvesting, for determining the new year, and for fixing the dates of certain other ceremonial observances. By the aid of such devices as the native priests have at their command they are enabled to fix the date of the winter solstice with a fair degree of accuracy. Such rude determination of time was probably an aboriginal invention, and may have furnished the motive in other cases for placing stone pillars in such unusual positions. The explanation of the governor of Zui for a sun symbol seen on an upright stone at Matsaki has been given in the description of that place. Single slabs are also used, as seen in the easternmost room group of Taaiyalana, and in the southwestern cl.u.s.ter on the same mesa, in the building of shrines for the deposit of plume sticks and other ceremonial objects.
An unusual employment of small stones in an upright position occurs at Zui. The inclosing wall of the church yard, still used as a burial place, is provided at intervals along its top with upright pieces of stone set into the joints of a regular coping course that caps the wall.
This feature may have some connection with the idea of vertical grave stones, noted at Kiakima. It is difficult to surmise what practical purpose could have been subserved by these small upright stones.