Native American Architecture
| I | INTRODUCTION |
Native American Architecture, traditional architecture of the peoples of who lived in North America before Europeans arrived. In traditional Native American culture, the dwelling was far more than a physical shelter or what Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier called “a machine for living.” For many Native Americans the house was a physical and spiritual representation of the universe. This article covers the architecture of indigenous (native) peoples in what is now the United States and Canada. For information on the indigenous architecture of Middle America and South America, see Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture and Native Americans of Middle and South America.
| II | PREHISTORIC EARTHWORK ARCHITECTURE |
Indigenous peoples lived in North America for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Their early structures included earth mounds that provided elevated bases for residences of rulers and pedestals for temples and other sacred architecture. The houses or temples, built of wood and often covered with thatched roofs, disappeared hundreds of years ago. Some of the mounded earth constructions remain, although diminished by thousands of years of erosion.
The earliest known enclosures built in North America are rings of mounds constructed in what is now Louisiana and lower Arkansas, from as early as 6,500 years ago to as late as 3,000 years ago. The largest of these structures—built about 5,400 years ago near Monroe, Louisiana—is a group of 11 mounds in an oval ring that measures roughly 200 by 260 m (650 ft by 850 ft). Monumental earth architecture was built by hunter-gatherer cultures in North America nearly 1,000 years before the Great Pyramids in Egypt.
From about 1700 bc to 700 bc, a second major period of mound building flourished, again concentrated along the Mississippi River in northern Louisiana, though its influence extended as far as central Texas, Arkansas, southern Missouri, and Indiana. This period of mound building seems to have had its center in a place today called Poverty Point, near Epps, Louisiana. The Poverty Point culture, responsible for building these mounds, is named after this site. The enormous complex at Poverty Point consists of six low, concentric rings of mounded earth with a large plaza at their center. The largest, outer ring measures about 1,200 m (nearly 4,000 ft) in diameter, and the plaza has a diameter of 181 m (about 595 ft). To the west of the rings stood a large mound, which today rises 20 m (66 ft) in height and extends more than 200 m (660 ft) in length. Nothing on this scale would be built in North America for several more centuries. See also Poverty Point National Monument.
A later mound-building culture, named Adena, arose in Ohio about 1100 bc and spread to Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New York before it ended about 200 ad. The dome-shaped Adena mounds were used as cemeteries, and rose higher from additional burials over the centuries. Early European and American explorers and settlers failed to appreciate the sacred nature of these burial mounds, and plundered and obliterated thousands of mounds. Other mounds slowly disappeared after generations of farmers repeatedly plowed them.
Another mound building culture, named Hopewell, also appears to have originated in Ohio but expanded west to Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma, south to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, east to Georgia and the Appalachian Mountains, and north to Wisconsin, Michigan, and lower Ontario in Canada. The Hopewell culture lasted from about 200 bc to 400 ad. Hopewell people built large, linear mounds to create enclosures in geometrical shapes, such as squares, circles, and octagons. Over time the Hopewell mounds extended outward in clusters, rather than upward as the Adena mounds did. The Hopewell mounds are especially significant because many of the forms are aligned with specific stars, solar events, or points on the horizon where the moon rises and sets. Awareness of astronomical cycles appears to have been highly important to the people.
Effigy mounds, built during and after the Adena and Hopewell culture periods, took the form of animals and human beings. The Serpent Mound in southern Ohio has a long wavy body about 382 m (1,254 ft) long and today rises about 1.2 m (4 ft) high. It was built about 1100 AD atop a bluff. The folds in its undulating body align in direction with the solar solstices and equinox.
The final mound-building culture, called Mississippian, flourished in the Mississippi River valley from about 800 ad to the mid-1500s. The mounds in some areas were still in use when Europeans ventured into North America. The mounds had square or rectangular bottoms and sloping sides that rose to broad flat tops or terraces. Residences of nobles or temples topped many of these mounds. Mississippian mounds, unlike the mounds of the Adena and Hopewell cultures, appeared near permanent settlements. Excavations at the largest Mississippian town—at Cahokia, Illinois—suggest that its native population once numbered perhaps 30,000 people and that about 120 mounds once stood there. The town’s central ceremonial plaza measured 5.6 by 3.6 km (3.5 by 2.25 mi), and a large adjacent mound, today called Monks Mound, rose through several terraces to a height of nearly 30 m (100 ft), dominating the countryside for miles around.
| III | TRADITIONS THAT SHAPED NATIVE BUILDINGS |
Hundreds of individual nations or tribal groups lived in North America when Europeans first ventured onto the continent. Distributed from the Arctic to central Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, the native population was denser in areas where food was plentiful and thinly dispersed in arid areas where food resources were scarce.
The hundreds of native groups in North America differed in many ways, yet they shared many important traditions. For example, they used local building materials and adapted their housing and way of life to the local climate. In addition, they perceived time as cyclical (occurring in repeated cycles) and planned life around the change of seasons. Many native groups moved their villages several times a year to follow seasonal food sources, in contrast to Europeans, who tended to live in one fixed place year round. Seasonal moves meant less-permanent architecture.
| A | Communal Property and Dwellings |
Seasonal moves also were linked with the Native American concept of land possession. Total and exclusive land ownership, as European Americans understood it, was simply not a Native American concept. Although a group might have the privilege of using a parcel of land for gathering plants or hunting game, seldom did a tribe or individual “own” a parcel of land. Another practice influencing architecture was that in many native groups extended families lived in communal (shared) structures. In most of these extended families a grandmother, her daughters, their husbands, and the grandchildren lived together. This practice contrasted with European and American preference for the single-family house. The Native American tribe or clan usually held foodstuffs in common so that in difficult times no one starved or was left in need.
Among the nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast, individuals or families conducted so-called potlatch ceremonies in which they gave away everything they had of value. Such ceremonies created bonds of obligation within the community and paid off debts. The people most highly esteemed were those who had given away the most. The concepts of shared property and potlatch contrasted sharply with European American concepts of thrift, saving, and individual self-reliance.
| B | Relationship to the Universe and Nature |
A more profound difference between European American and Native American perceptions lay in how human beings saw themselves in relationship to the universe and in what they believed their responsibilities were to the natural world and to each other. Most European Americans saw themselves as separate from creation and adversaries of nature, ever struggling to conquer and subdue nature and force it to yield to their will. Native Americans saw themselves as one component of nature, sharing a living spirit that pervaded everything, animate (living) and inanimate (nonliving) objects alike.
Virtually all animate creatures were thought of as human, with some, as it happened, taking the form of people. Thus, native peoples undertook every action with respect for the spirit of the land, the forest, the animals taken for game, the plants harvested for food, and so forth. Peoples of the Great Plains, for example, felt it was a privilege to live in dwellings covered with the skin of the buffalo and thus to partake of the spirit of the animal that provided nearly all their food. Before peoples of the Pacific Northwest built a house, they asked permission of the earth to disturb the ground, so they could make the house. They would offer prayers to the red cedar if they needed a log for the house. To take animals or trees without making these supplications, or to take more than was needed, was to act irreverently. Such action put the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature in a state of imbalance that could lead only to problems. European American settlers found this all-pervasive animism and deep spiritual interconnectedness with the world nearly impossible to understand.
| C | Distinct Culture Areas |
Links among individual Native American groups were based on similarities in language and geographic situation. Ten distinct areas of shared culture evolved, each of which corresponded with a geographic and climatic zone. Each area had a dominant language family, social customs and religious practices held largely in common, and a broadly shared cosmology (view of the universe). The dwellings and other structures within a geographic and cultural area also tended to follow common patterns characteristic of that area.
In each of the ten geographic and cultural regions, one or at most two distinctive house types tended to prevail. These traditional dwellings, unique to a region, evolved over thousands of years in response to a way of life, to readily available building materials, and to local climate. Houses built in one region would have been impractical and uncomfortable if built in a different region. More important, because houses served as models of the cosmos they would have no meaning in another region.
Traditional Native American houses began to disappear, often under strong pressure from the United States government, after American traders and missionaries entered native communities in the 1700s and 1800s. Native peoples were soon forced to live in American-style houses, which held no cultural meaning for them and which they often resented. During the last quarter of the 20th century, however, various groups have revived traditional native house forms, especially those rich in imagery and meaning, for ceremonial use. The descriptions of native building forms and town organization in this article rely on descriptions made by European American observers, anywhere from 1500 to 1870.
| IV | SOUTHEAST CULTURE AREA |
Woodlands covered the entire eastern portion of North America when Europeans reached the continent. During the 1500s and 1600s continual battles with European explorers and settlers, and the introduction of smallpox and other European diseases, caused turmoil and dislocation among Native American tribes. By 1700, however, the tribes in eastern North America occupied established areas, and travelers, historians, and others recorded their ways of living.
The Southeast Culture Area extended from what is now the Carolinas south to Florida and west to Louisiana. Most of the tribes in the region spoke Muskogean languages. They included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. Mound building and ceremonial use of mounds continued in a limited way in the Southeast until the early 18th century. The Etowah Indian Mounds, an important group of flat-topped pyramidal mounds from about 1400 ad, still survive in Georgia.
The tribes in the Southeast generally lived in villages and towns. An early description of Creek towns, written by American naturalist William Bartram during his travels in the 1770s, mentions three essential features in the center of a town. The first was a large circular meetinghouse with a domed roof. Next to it was a square plaza enclosed by four buildings, which was used as a community meeting ground. The third feature was a large court or plaza for ritual ball games. Around this town center, individual houses and agricultural plots were located. The residential compounds of Creek tribal chiefs consisted of a smaller version of the town meeting ground: four buildings arranged around a small square.
Wood was the most available building material in the Southeast. Families typically lived in rectangular houses built of slender wooden poles, made from straight young trees, which were spaced at intervals and placed directly in the earth. Small branches, woven like basketwork, filled the space between the supporting poles. Clay covered the branches and formed a kind of plaster that plugged holes. On many dwellings finely woven mats of reeds or rushes covered the plastered walls, inside and out. Locally available plant materials, such as rushes or straw, were used for the roof. This construction method, of wooden frames filled in with plaster, resembled a medieval European system known as wattle-and-daub. With their thatched roofs, native dwellings of the Southeast somewhat resembled in appearance traditional English cottages of the 15th and 16th centuries.
| V | NORTHEAST CULTURE AREA |
The Northeast Culture Area began north of the Southeast Area and ran from Virginia through New England and into Canada. The Northeastern woodlands extended westward as far as the Mississippi River. Many of the tribes in the Northeast spoke Algonquian languages. They included the Delaware, Mohegan, and Narragansett in the East and the Fox and Shawnee around the Great Lakes. The Iroquois and other tribes, who spoke Iroquoian languages, also lived in the Northeast, in what is now New York State and southern Canada.
Around the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, native peoples built houses of slender wooden poles pushed directly into the ground in two parallel lines. The poles opposite one another were bent over and tied together at the top to form a rounded roof. Saplings (young, small trees) were attached horizontally to this structure. Mats woven from rushes, or slabs of bark, were sewn together to cover these light frames in overlapping patterns. In The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), English colonizer John Smith described these native houses as being comfortably snug and able to withstand hard rains. Such dwellings could house two or three families.
| A | The Wigwam |
The most common house type among Algonquian tribes of New England was the wigwam, which means “dwelling” in Algonquian languages. Wigwams resembled Chesapeake Bay houses, but they were circular rather than rectangular in shape. These one- or two-family dwellings were made of saplings placed in the ground in a circle, bent over, and tied together. Additional saplings were then wrapped horizontally around this frame, forming smaller circles as they approached the top to create a dome-shaped structure. The dome was covered with slabs of bark, mats of rushes or reeds, or—in more northern areas—sheets of birch bark. In areas of heavy rainfall, people might add a covering of animal skins, sewn together, to form a more watertight roof. Some wigwams had a cone-shaped frame, made of unbent poles that leaned inward and met at the top. Animal skins also covered these dwellings. Algonquians tended to live in groups in small villages. Communities moved seasonally between a summer town, built near their fields, and a winter town, built in a forested area where game was more easily found.
| B | The Longhouse |
The Iroquois tribes lived in central New York state and along the St. Lawrence River and the northern shore of Lake Ontario. For centuries they had fought one another, but as early as the early 16th century five Iroquois tribes, or nations, formed a confederation with shared power, and the warfare ended. The Five Nations, listed in order of their location in New York state, from west to east, were the Seneca (called “Keepers of the Western Door”), the Cayuga (“Keepers of the Great Swamp”, the Onondaga (“Keepers of the Council Fire”), the Oneida (“Keepers of the Standing Rock”), and the Mohawk (“Keepers of the Eastern Door”). The Five Nations of the Iroquois confederation lived in large towns, many of which were surrounded by palisades, walls of strong, thick wooden posts, which protected the community from attack. Their society was matrilineal, meaning that it followed the female line. Sisters lived with their mother and their husbands and children in long rectangular houses. The name the Iroquois called themselves, Haudenosaunee, means in the Iroquois language, “People building an extended house” or “People of the longhouse.” Iroquois is the French version of a derogatory Algonquian word.
Although several related families lived in a longhouse, each family unit had its own section about 9 to 12 m (30 or 40 ft) long. A continuous passage ran through the center, linking the individual family units. Platforms along the side walls served for sleeping and storage. Each family maintained a small fire in the center of its section. A hole in the roof above permitted the smoke to escape. An Iroquois longhouse was described as a house of “five fires” or “seven fires” to indicate the number of families living together and the rough dimensions of the building. Over time longhouses could be extended as needed, with new family sections added at each end. Excavations of former Iroquoisan town sites have revealed traces of longhouses measuring as long as 120 m (400 ft).
Like other Native Americans in the Northeast, the Iroquois used saplings to build their dwellings. A longhouse was built of large saplings placed in the ground in four rows that ran the length and width of the building. Horizontal sapling beams linked these posts. Flexible green saplings formed a rounded roof, bent from the top of one row of posts to the opposite row and tied down. Large, overlapping slabs of elm bark typically covered the entire frame, but bark from other trees could be used as well. Individual slabs of elm bark might measure as much as 0.9 m (3 ft) wide by 1.8 m (6 ft) long. A door opened at each end of the structure. The end chambers were often used to store food supplies and other materials belonging to the house as a whole.
The Iroquois took not only their name from their distinctive longhouse, but also their image of themselves as a people. They thought of their confederacy as a huge longhouse that stretched 390 km (240 mi) from Lake Erie to the Hudson River and had five fires, or sections, representing the Five Nations. The tribal chiefs represented the posts supporting this great longhouse, and the clan leaders called sachems formed the roof braces. Like the sisters and their families in a longhouse, the Five Nations were bound together as a great family.
| VI | GREAT PLAINS CULTURE AREA |
The Great Plains Culture Area lay west of the Mississippi River and stretched to the Rocky Mountains. It consisted of tall-grass prairies and short-grass high plains. Native American settlements in this region were sparse before 1500. Although some peoples raised corn and beans, they also relied on migrating herds of buffalo as a vital source of meat. Siouan languages, spoken by the Crow, Sioux, and other groups, predominated on the plains. Some tribes, including the Caddo and Pawnee, spoke Caddoan languages; others, such as the Cheyenne and Ojibwa, spoke Algonquian languages.
It is commonly believed that all Native Americans who inhabited the Great Plains lived in cone-shaped tents called tipis (also spelled tepees). Many Americans think all Native Americans once lived in tipis. However, only some native peoples—and only on the Great Plains—lived in tipis. The word tipi in Sioux languages means “home place.” The term would have made no sense where people spoke other languages.
| A | The Tipi |
The tipi was a portable structure designed for nomadic living. Native peoples who followed migrating buffalo herds on the Great Plains could take it down, pack it up, and carry it with them. Tribes that lived farther from the major rivers relied more heavily on the buffalo than did those in settled agricultural communities. These buffalo-hunting tribes—the ancestors of the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Santee, and Yanktonai—lived in villages of relatively small tipis before 1500. They built these dwellings by stretching tanned buffalo hides around a cone-shaped frame, which was made of long, vertical poles that leaned inward and met at the top. When the buffalo migrated, they took down the tipis, and domesticated dogs dragged the tipi poles and skin-coverings to the next location. Moving the tipis was a difficult task.
After 1500 a major change occurred: Spanish explorers brought the horse to North America. Horses had died out in North America by the time the last Ice Age ended, about 10,000 years ago. Using the reintroduced horses, the tribes of the Great Plains could follow buffalo herds, moving household goods, including the tipi, with ease. Tipis increased in size as horses became more available. Before the horse, tipis had measured about 2.7 m (9 ft) in diameter and had covers made up of perhaps five buffalo hides. By the early 19th century tipis typically measured 5.5 to 6 m (18 to 20 ft) in diameter and required about 12 hides for their cover. Extremely large tipis used for special ceremonies could require more than 30 hides. The Blackfoot nation of the northern Plains made the largest tipis.
Despite their appearance tipis were not simple tents. Their pole frames, arranged in an oval plan, leaned toward the west. Thus, the shape and tilt of the tipi meant that it presented its narrowest dimension to the prevailing wind from the west. Because of the tipi’s westward lean, the harder the wind blew, the more the wind’s pressure tended to push the tipi into the earth. The tipi’s skin cover was pulled from the back (west) around to the front (east), where wooden pins connected the two edges, leaving an opening for entry at the bottom. The entrance faced east, toward the rising sun. At the top of the tipi, where the frame poles converged, the skin cover had smoke flaps, to be opened or closed depending on the wind’s direction. Although the men obtained the poles and buffalo hides, the women prepared the building materials and hides. The women also took down, packed, and then set up the tipis during relocation; ownership of the tipi resided with the women.
Although most tipi covers were plain, some groups, such as the Blackfoot, painted their tipis. The patterns or designs on Blackfoot tipis might tell a story, depict a battle scene, or show an image of nature given to the occupant in a dream. The decoration typically appeared in three bands. The lowest band depicted Earth, the middle band depicted dream visions, and the upper band corresponded to the sky. The sky band often contained white dots representing stars. Elk, otter, bison or other animal images often appeared in the middle band. Tipi decorations were unique and belonged to the individual living in the tipi. Some designs could be passed down through families.
The tipi’s shape and structure also carried symbolic meaning. The roughly circular shape of the tipi’s base represented the universe and the cycle of the seasons. The tipi was covered with buffalo skins, and the poles of the frame represented the buffalo’s ribs. To be inside the tipi was to become one with the buffalo whose life made the tipi possible and whose flesh made the life of the Plains peoples possible.
| B | The Earth Lodge |
A number of Great Plains tribes who spoke Caddoan or Siouan languages—such as the Arikara, Hidatsa, Mandan, and Pawnee—lived in fixed settlements and farmed. These tribes built large earth-covered lodges clustered in communities near the Missouri River and its tributaries. The river valleys were thickly wooded with cottonwood trees, which provided building materials. According to early-19th-century descriptions, each domed lodge measured 12 m (40 ft) or more in diameter and could accommodate two or three, or more, families. During the bitterly cold winters of the Great Plains, the thick earth covering of these lodges prevented heat loss and maintained a comfortable temperature inside. In the summer the thick mass of earth kept the interior relatively cool compared to the humid heat outside.
The Caddoan-speaking nations employed the same basic construction techniques. Construction began by digging out and leveling the floor, which lay slightly below the level of the surrounding ground. Next, a tall central structure was built of four or more stout cottonwood tree trunks. Trimmed of their bark, the trunks were put into holes dug in the floor in the corners of a square. Four or more massive cross beams spanned these central posts from top to top. Around this post-and-beam structure stood an outer ring of shorter posts, also spanned with beams. Walls were formed by leaning masses of slender poles against the outer ring, while many long poles spanned the top to form the roof. A smoke hole was left at the center. Additional posts and beams framed a tunnellike entry passageway. To seal the house, the roof poles were covered with mats or masses of woven grass. Earth was then packed over the entire structure, several feet thick at the base and diminishing in thickness toward the smoke hole at the top.
| C | The Sweat Lodge |
Most Native American nations use some form of sweat lodge for spiritual purification and preparation for important activities or events. The Finnish sauna is a European equivalent, but its purpose is almost entirely to produce physical well-being. The Native American sweat lodge focuses on spiritual and mental well-being as well. Known as onikare in the Sioux language, the sweat lodge is fundamental to the spiritual life of the Plains people.
Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux religious leader, provided a good description of the construction and symbolism of the Plains sweat lodge in The Sacred Pipe (1953). It is built of 12 to 16 willow saplings, each 2.5 to 3 m (8 to 10 ft) long and slightly less than 2.5 cm (1.0 in) in diameter. The saplings stand in the ground in a circle that measures about 2 m (about 7 ft) in diameter. Most sweat lodges have entrances facing east, the direction from which the light of wisdom comes, according to Black Elk. Construction begins by taking the pair of willow saplings flanking the door and bending them over the center toward the western end. The opposite pair of saplings on the west are bent to meet the eastern pair, and the ends are twisted together to form two parallel hoops running east to west. A north and south pair of saplings are similarly bent over to form north-south hoops. The remaining saplings, bent diagonally over the middle, complete a wigwam-like dome.
In the center of the floor, a pit is dug slightly larger than 0.3 m (1 ft) in diameter and 0.3 m deep. The soil from the pit is carried through the doorway and used to make the unchi, a small mound representing Earth, about 1.8 m (6 ft) in front of the lodge entrance. Some of the soil may make a path to the door, symbolizing the Good Road. Steam for the sweat lodge comes from rocks heated in a fire that burns east of the unchi, on the line of the Good Road. Native peoples once used layers of buffalo hides to cover the sweat lodge frame and create total darkness inside. Today buffalo are scarce, and they use old quilts, blankets, or canvas tarpaulins instead. The darkness represents human ignorance, while the glowing hot rocks, brought inside at the start of the ceremony, represent the light of wisdom that comes from Wakan Tanka (the Great Mystery), supreme divinity of the Sioux. The covers are stored between ceremonies, leaving the bare frame exposed.
| VII | SUBARCTIC CULTURE AREA |
Most of what is now Canada belonged to the Subarctic Culture Area. Across central Canada Algonquian-speaking tribes such as the Cree predominated, but in the West, Athapaskan languages—spoken by the Beaver, Chipewyan, and Kutchin—dominated. Short subarctic summers provided too brief a growing season to enable agriculture. Life was instead sustained by hunting caribou, moose, and other mammals; fishing; and gathering such foods as berries, nuts, and roots. Houses from the Atlantic Coast to the Rocky Mountains were variations on the wigwam common in the Northeast. Grasses protected by hides covered subarctic wigwams, in contrast with the bark or woven mats used in the Northeast. Some subarctic wigwams had a cone shape, rather than the domed roof of the Northeast.
| VIII | ARCTIC CULTURE AREA |
The Arctic Culture Area consisted of northwestern Alaska and northern Canada and was inhabited primarily by Inuit peoples. In the past the Inuit sustained themselves largely by hunting marine mammals such as seal and walrus, and by fishing. During the brief summer, they resided in villages, in large houses made of large rocks and chunks of sod. These houses in some ways resembled the earth lodges of the Great Plains, but entry was through a tunnel excavated below ground level to retain warm air inside the house. The Inuit sometimes built temporary hunting lodges for the summer, with low walls of earth and tents of skin over the upper area.
The best-known house type of the Arctic region is the igloo (also spelled iglu), a temporary winter house built of the most available material: snow. The snow is packed and then cut into blocks for stacking in rows in an upward spiral. The spiral slopes inward toward the top and is capped by a single block. Sometimes a single piece of clear, freshwater ice replaces a block of snow to provide a window. Entry is through a short tunnel made of snow blocks with a rounded roof. A semicircular floor, excavated before building starts, sits below the outside ground surface to trap any heat generated inside the igloo. An elevated ledge of snow makes up the other half of the floor; it is covered with twigs and caribou hides for beds. Lighting traditionally came from lamps that burned whale oil. Igloos are typically single-family houses. Related families might build a number of igloos close together and connect them by roofed tunnels. Igloos ranged in diameter from about 2 to 5 m (about 7 to 15 ft). Large ceremonial igloos could measure 8 m (27 ft) across, with a dome rising 4 m (over 12 ft) at its height.
| IX | PLATEAU CULTURE AREA |
The elevated region known as the Plateau Culture Area is bounded by the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Cascade and coastal mountain ranges on the west. It covers much of eastern Washington, Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and adjacent regions in Canada, and it encompasses the drainage basins of the Columbia and lower Snake rivers. Salishan languages predominated in the northern part of the region, spoken by the Flathead, Pend d’Oreille (also known as Kalispels), Spokane, and others. Many tribes in the southern part spoke Sahaptin languages, including the Nez Perce, Walla Walla, and Yakama. Although this is a relatively arid area, great rivers flow through it, and fish provided the principal food in much of the region.
In Canada, near the Fraser River in southern British Columbia, some Salishan-speaking tribes lived in round, partially underground earth lodges. Dug about 1 m (about 3 ft) into the ground, these lodges, often called pit houses, protected the occupants from the elements. Over the excavated area the people built a frame of heavy poles and covered it with woven grasses and mats of branches. They finished off the house by packing layers of soil, grass, and pine needles over it for insulation. A smoke hole was left at the top. A notched log ladder poked through the smoke hole and provided access to the floor of the lodge.
Because the climate was warmer on the southern Plateau, the floors required only a shallow excavation for earth insulation. Tribes along the Columbia River erected frames of substantial logs over an excavated floor area. The logs angled inward from a rectangular ground plan, meeting to leave a smoke hole at the top. They were then covered with many layers of sewn rush or reed mats. In the Sahaptin-language region farther south, people constructed similar frames with somewhat thinner sapling poles and more steeply pitched sides. These houses were similarly covered with layers of sewn reed mats.
| X | GREAT BASIN CULTURE AREA |
The Great Basin Culture Area, south of the Plateau, extended between the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the west. This desert region covered what is today Nevada, Utah, and eastern California. Because the Great Basin was so dry and had little plant life, the native population was limited and widely scattered. Nearly all the people spoke Uto-Aztecan languages, including Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute. These tribes led a nomadic life, moving from place to place during the year so that they did not make excessive use of the game or plant life in any particular location. Because of their movement they needed dwellings that could be quickly made and abandoned when they relocated. The wickiups they erected were dome-shaped houses built with a light frame of bent, slender saplings. The frame was covered with brush, grasses, or other nearby plant materials. Wickiups resembled the wigwams of the Northeast.
| XI | NORTHWEST COAST CULTURE AREA |
The Northwest Coast Culture Area extended northward from the Oregon-California border and continued through Washington, British Columbia, and along the panhandle of Alaska. This narrow band, hemmed in by coastal mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, has a moderate climate during summer and winter but is often blanketed with fog or drenched with rain. Towering evergreen trees covered the land, and red cedar was highly prized as a building material.
The Northwest Coast was fairly densely populated, with Wakashan language speakers—such as the Nuu-Chah-Nulth (Nootka) and Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl)—in British Columbia, and Salishan speakers—including the Coast Salish, Duwamish, and Tillamook—in the region around Puget Sound and along the Oregon coast. Other important native groups of the region included the Haida and Tlingit. Food came largely from the sea and coastal rivers, and included shellfish, fish, and sea mammals, even the occasional whale. Salmon was particularly important. Because of the abundant fish and the many kinds of berries and roots readily available in the forests, obtaining food was relatively easy, especially in comparison to the Great Basin and Southwest Culture areas. Thus, larger native populations could thrive in the Northwest Coast Area.
The relative ease of obtaining food freed time for the peoples of the Northwest Coast to develop a complex social life and an oral literature. In some areas they displayed literary and historical information visually on crest poles, commonly called totem poles. The pole stood in front of the house or formed a support post. Images on it represented the origins and history of the people living in the house, typically starting with mythic animal-people at the bottom and moving to more recent events at the top. During the rainy winters, when days were short, the people spent much time indoors performing elaborate dance ceremonies that recounted traditional stories.
Of all the native dwellings of North America, wooden plank houses of the Northwest Coast most closely resembled what European American traders considered architecture. Built of long boards of cedar, the plank houses had a rectangular shape with a sloping roof. Plank houses typically stood just behind the beach of an inlet or cove, in one or two rows that followed the curve of the shore. They faced the sea. The extended household unit consisted of brothers, their nephews (sisters’ sons), and each brother’s wife, sons, and unmarried daughters. The house fire burned in a central pit. A raised platform ran around the side and back walls to provide sleeping quarters. Plank houses were used from fall to spring. In summer, when communities moved into the forests for fishing and berry gathering, people removed the planks and carried them inland for making temporary shelters.
Construction of a plank house was a complicated affair that might take several years. Some individuals specialized in certain tasks or building skills. Preparation required felling huge trees to make the major posts and beams, and then shaping and smoothing broad planks for the walls with stones, antlers, and seashells. After a house was completed, a potlatch ceremony was held in which the family distributed goods such as baskets, sealskins, and other possessions. Plank houses could be very large, especially among the Kwakiutl and the Haida, measuring about 12 to 18 m (40 to 60 ft) to a side. The biggest Haida houses were called six-beam houses after the six huge tree trunks that supported the roof.
| XII | CALIFORNIA CULTURE AREA |
More than 100 native tribes, speaking a variety of languages, lived in the California Culture Area (now the state of California). Along the coast the climate was moderate to mild. Inland valleys, however, were hot and extremely dry. Some groups inhabited the forests along the coast; others occupied the warmer inland valleys or the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Even though the region’s climate and plant life were so varied, a distinct culture emerged.
Tribes such as the Yurok and the Hupa built plank houses of redwood in the northern forests, where towering redwood trees grew. Redwood, like the red cedar used in the Northwest, was highly valued for its resistance to decay. The Yurok built sweat lodges that were smaller versions of their houses, constructing them completely underground so that only the wooden roof emerged above ground. North of San Francisco Bay, Pomo groups built round or elongated frame houses of saplings, with domed roofs covered entirely with thatch. In the hot San Joaquin Valley of central California, the Yokuts built tall wedge-shaped frame houses of saplings covered with layers of rush mats. In some Yokut communities a large ramada (shade structure) bordered a row of houses. Built of logs, the ramada had a roof but remained open on all sides, providing shade and a more comfortable place to do work outside while letting air pass through. In the coastal region around present-day Santa Barbara, the Chumash people built tall dome-shaped houses with light willow frames that were covered with grasses in overlapping rows.
| XIII | SOUTHWEST CULTURE AREA |
The Southwest Culture Area lay in extremely arid country east of California, between the Sierra Madre and the southern Rocky Mountains. It encompassed what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern portions of Colorado and Utah. Scattered tribes inhabited the Southwest, some living along rivers that made agriculture possible. Several distinct cultural groups arose in this desert region, including the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi. Their descendants—among them, the Pima, Pueblo, and Zuni—were the people encountered by Spanish explorers in the 1500s. Native groups in this region spoke a variety of languages. Athapaskan speakers included the Apache and the Navajo. Pueblo groups spoke a variety of languages, including Keresan, Tewa, and Tiwa.
| A | The Mogollon and Hohokam Pit House |
The Mogollon culture developed in central Arizona and southern New Mexico, from about 250 ad to as late as 1450. The Hohokam culture flourished from about 900 to 1450 in southern Arizona, mainly along the Gila and Salt rivers. Hohokam means “vanished ones” in the language of their descendents, the Pima Indians. The Hohokam people developed sophisticated systems of canals to carry river water to their fields. Both the Mogollon and Hohokam lived in small villages, although the most significant Hohokam site is a city and cultural center called Skoaquick (Snaketown) located between present-day Phoenix and Tucson.
The early houses of the Mogollon and Hohokam were semisubterranean (partly underground) pit houses that took advantage of the surrounding earth for insulation. The ground kept daytime temperatures cooler inside and lessened the chill of desert nights. A pit house began with a squarish pit about a meter deep. Four posts, placed in the corners, supported four horizontal roof beams, although some houses had additional posts and beams. Poles on the ground leaned against the roof beams to create sloping side walls, and more poles ran across the top of the roof beams to form the roof. Branches and grasses covered the roof rafters and side walls, and a thick layer of adobe (sun-dried clay) plaster finished the outer surface.
| B | The Anasazi Great House |
A third ancient culture, the Anasazi, developed around the Four Corners area, where Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico meet. It flourished from about 300 to 1300. The Anasazi were the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples, but the name Anasazi (meaning “ancient ones” or “ancient enemies”) was given to them by the Navajo, who moved into this area after the Anasazi moved on. Some scholars now use the name Ancestral Puebloan peoples instead of Anasazi. Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado contains a remarkable collection of Anasazi sites, documenting many of the stages of their cultural and architectural development. Pit houses dating from 400 to 700 ad cluster on top of the mesa. The Anasazi gradually began to build stone houses above ground after 700. At the same time structures that resembled the pit houses were more deeply excavated and eventually became entirely subterranean. The underground chamber that evolved from the pit house eventually became the ceremonial kiva still known today among Pueblo peoples. Two-story and even some three-story houses neighbored one another by 900.
Around 900 a significant change occurred for reasons still unknown. Construction of large, multistory buildings began in the extremely hot and dry Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico. The walls were built of carefully crafted small blocks and tablets of stone. From 900 to 1300 the Anasazi built, and periodically enlarged, 12 large village-like structures, including nine so-called Great Houses. These Great Houses looked much like modern apartment blocks and contained hundreds of rooms as well as round underground chambers called kivas. The largest Great House is Pueblo Bonito, which appears to be the central building of the Chaco Canyon complex. Pueblo Bonito is shaped like the letter D, with its 150-m (495-ft) straight side facing south. It contained as many as 800 rooms, stacked five stories high at the back of the northern curve, and it had 37 kiva chambers. A Great Kiva in the center measured nearly (50 ft) in diameter. Pueblo Bonito could have housed up to 3,000 people, but archaeologists have not found nearly enough burials nor big enough refuse heaps to correspond to such a large population living at this site for 400 years.
What this Great House and others in Chaco Canyon were used for is the subject of intense debate. According to one theory, Chaco culture settlements in the Four Corners area extended over an area equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined; Chaco Canyon was its cultural and political center. The Anasazi may have used the many rooms of the Great Houses in the canyon as granaries to hold corn gathered from all the surrounding communities and parceled it out to individual communities during times of local drought or crop failure. Chaco Canyon was very likely also a pilgrimage center where people gathered for celebration at certain times of the year, as determined by celestial events such as the solstice. Solar calendar devices incorporated in the architecture of the Chaco buildings suggest this purpose. At sunrise on the summer solstice, for example, a narrow shaft of sunlight flashes through precisely placed small windows in the stone walls and strikes a carefully placed niche in the opposite wall.
The Anasazi dispersed after 1300, as their political power waned and as climate changes and severe drought plagued the Four Corners area. Some went north to the Mesa Verde area in Colorado. Known as cliff dwellers, they built protected towns and villages tucked in eroded, cavelike alcoves in the sides of the mesa. One house, known as Spruce Tree, had 134 rooms and 10 kivas. The largest of all, Cliff Palace, measured (425 ft) in length and had 220 rooms and 26 kivas and ceremonial towers.
| C | The Pueblo |
Over the several centuries after 1300, when the Anasazi dispersal began, these Ancestral Puebloans established new communities in the Southwest. They retained the desire to live closely together, in clustered houses that fostered tightly knit communities. Some villages, called pueblos, were built of rooms stacked in multiple stories, with each story set back from the one below. Ladders provided access to the rooms above. The Ancestral Puebloans also shared a religious and social system that focused on the kiva as a gathering place, largely for males. Those who lived in rocky areas built houses of stone. Adobe mortar held the stones together, and a coat of adobe plaster covered the buildings. Nearer the Rio Grande River, where stone was unavailable, bricks of adobe served as the building material.
The ancestors of the Hopi moved to Black Mesa in northern Arizona. One of their villages, Oraibi, is believed to have been occupied since 1150. Most other Hopi villages existing today date from after 1680, when the Walpi Pueblo was begun near Flagstaff. The Zuni, who may descend in part from the Mogollon people, established six or seven villages southwest of Chaco Canyon about 1450. Each Zuni village was compact, built of multistory houses as high as five stories that were organized around a few open plazas. This tight organization gradually changed in the last few centuries to a more scattered community of one- or two-story houses.
A larger native group moved progressively southeast toward the Rio Grande and its tributaries. One part built the Acoma Pueblo atop a high mesa in New Mexico, perhaps as early as 950. Acoma’s multistory houses, arranged in parallel straight rows, formed a series of streets. Before 1500 Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande Valley shaped adobe bricks by hand. After contact with Spanish explorers and missionaries in the 1500s, they began to use wooden molds. Because adobe crumbles in rain, a coating of adobe plaster over the bricks required regular renewal to protect the bricks beneath. In many communities, the people reapplied the plaster in a ceremony each autumn.
Taos Pueblo, the northernmost of the Rio Grande Pueblo communities, was begun about 1400. It has two housing bocks built around seven kivas. A creek separates the blocks. North House rises in setback fashion to five stories; South House, to four stories. Although rooms have been added and removed, the Taos Pueblo remains much as it was when Europeans first arrived. Many other Pueblo communities today have forsaken the densely packed character of their original settlements in favor of smaller, often separate, houses spread out around the original pueblo.
| D | The Navajo Hogan |
Anthropologists speculate that Athapaskan-speaking peoples, such as the Navajo and Apache, who live scattered around Pueblo tribes, emigrated from western Canada many centuries ago, arriving in the Southwest perhaps around 1300. Although this theory does not agree directly with Navajo and Apache creation stories, their accounts of creation do include descriptions of heroic and dangerous journeys. In addition, there are parallels in construction and heavy wood frames between the oldest Navajo houses, called hogans, and the pit houses of western Canada. The Navajo called themselves Diné (“the people”). Hogan in the Diné language translates as “home place.”
The Navajo hogan represents a smaller version of the harmonious universe, which, for the Navajo, is held in balance by matched opposites, such as male and female. At some distant time the Navajo developed two kinds of hogans, male and female. Ceremonies such as healing rituals took place in the male hogan, whereas the female hogan housed the family. Today, however, ceremonies are performed most often in the female hogans that have become predominant across the Navajo homeland.
The cone-shaped male hogan is the older of the two, and the major Navajo religious ritual, the Blessing Way, provides instructions given by the gods for its proper construction. Four poles with forked (branched) tops support the hogan and mirror the land of the Diné, which lies between four sacred mountains: east, south, west, and north. Blessings and prayers accompany placement of the four poles, beginning with the eastern pole next to the entry. This, the White Bead pole, is set into the earth with bits of white shell placed underneath it. Next comes the southern “Mountain World’s Leg,” set with bits of turquoise beneath it. After it comes the western “Water World’s Leg,” with bits of abalone shell, an item used in trade, beneath it. Then the northern “Corn World’s Leg” is placed with bits of black obsidian beneath it. Finally, a northeast pole is added to finish a frame for the eastern door, with various semiprecious stones placed beneath the pole. The intertwined forked tops lock the five main poles together. Straight poles are leaned against the first five to create the walls, and a tunnellike entrance opens to the east. Lastly, the conical house receives a thick layer of adobe plaster for insulation and a concluding blessing.
The female hogan has a basic shape, either six-sided or eight-sided, with many variations. It is built of cribbed logs—that is, logs joined by notches at the corners—much like a log cabin. The door faces east. The walls reach about shoulder height and are capped by a roof that slopes upward to the center. Rafters typically form the roof, radiating from the center downward to the walls. Early hogans, however, generally had a cribbed roof of notched logs placed in a hexagonal or octagonal shape to match the walls below. As the roof rose, each layer used slightly shorter logs until the sides came together at the top, leaving an open smokehole. Adobe plaster usually covered the roof.
The Navajo, unlike the Pueblo peoples, lived in widely separated, small family units, typically made up of a mother and her married daughters. Each nuclear family (husband, wife, and their children) in the extended family had its own hogan, usually within calling distance of the others. The family’s buildings, called an outfit, consisted of a few hogans, arbors for outdoor work, corrals for sheep and horses, other work-related structures as needed, and a family sweat lodge.
A hogan’s eastward orientation is crucial for its proper functioning. Each day Navajo men rise just before the sun and greet the sun with prayers to ensure harmony that day with their world. In Navajo belief, human beings have an obligation to conduct themselves in such a way as to preserve this harmony. Many things can upset this harmony. Someone who is ill, for example, is believed to be out of harmony, and healing ceremonies are conducted to restore harmony to the individual. These ceremonies must take place inside a properly built, blessed, and consecrated hogan to have the desired healing effect.
Although there were many variations in the shape and size of Native American dwellings, the traditional houses built by the many distinct nations and tribes embodied cultural imagery and concepts about the universe. In this way their houses enabled the people to feel rooted in their place and to feel connected with their universe.
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