Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/165

 The first two tribes, although their antecedent history is little known, seem to be in a transitional stage from the Lower to the Middle Status of barbarism, having passed into the horticultural and sedentary condition without being far enough advanced to imitate their near neighbors in the use of adobe brick and of stone in their houses. They seem to be existing examples of that ever-recurring advancement of ruder tribes in past ages, through which the Village Indians of the pueblo type were constantly replenished from the more barbarous tribes. The present Taos Indians are another example.

It is made reasonably plain, I think, from the facts stated, that in the Upper Status of savagery, and also in the Lower Status of barbarism, the Indian household was formed of a number of families of gentile kin; that they practiced communism in living in the household, and that this principle found expression in their house architecture and predetermined its character.