Page:Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines.djvu/166



We are next to consider the houses and mode of life of the Sedentary Village Indians, among whom architecture exhibits a higher development, with the use of durable materials, and with the defensive principle super-added to that of adaptation to communism in living. It will not be difficult to discover and follow this latter principle, as one of the chief characteristics of this architecture in the pueblo houses in New Mexico, and in the region of the San Juan River, and afterwards in those of Mexico and Central America. Throughout all these regions there was one connected system of house architecture, as there was substantially one mode of life.

In New Mexico, going southward, the Indians, at the epoch of discovery, were met in a new dress and in an improved condition. They had advanced out of the Lower and into the Middle Status of barbarism; the houses in which they dwelt were of adobe brick or of stone, two, three, four, and sometimes five and six stories in height, and containing from fifty to five hundred apartments. They cultivated maize and plants by means of irrigating canals. The water was drawn from a running stream, taken at a point above the pueblo and carried down and through a series of garden beds. They wore mantles of cotton, as well as garments of skin. The present Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are in the main their descendants. They live, some of them, in the same identical houses their forefathers occupied at the time of Coronado's expedition to Now Mexico in 1541-1542, as