 | The material culture of Pueblo Bonito |  |
LIVING CONDITIONS IN PUEBLO BONITO
Family life in Pueblo Bonito probably differed very little from that
which Mindeleff saw among the western Pueblos in the final quarter
of the nineteenth century. Descent was unquestionably matrilineal,
as it still is; the mother, rather than the father, was head of the
household. Married daughters, with their husbands and children,
continued to live in the maternal home. All shared the same living
quarters, the same hearth and kitchen utensils. Meals were eaten
twice a day from food bowls placed directly upon the floor; fingers
served in lieu of forks. Blankets and pelts were folded as seats by
day and spread upon the floor at night. The living room was just
that—a place in which to live, eat, sleep, work, and entertain visitors.
As a rule, Bonitian homes consisted of a general living room and
one or more rooms for storage. These were on the same level and
adjoining. Interior steps and hatchways suggest also some degree of
vertical proprietorship, but we can only guess as to the extent of it.
Because the upper floors had fallen, our observations were restricted
largely to first-story rooms. A number of these, originally constructed
and utilized as dwellings, had subsequently been vacated when additional
rooms were built in front of or above them. By the time Pueblo
Bonito reached its peak, owners of most ground-floor apartments had
obviously moved to the better-lighted second, third, and fourth stories.
Old Bonitian homes look pretty casual when compared with those
in the newer sections of town. Their ruder stonework was heavily
plastered with mud; the mud was pitted with imprints of the plasterer's
fingers and sometimes studded with sandstone chips. Interior
walls were sometimes whitewashed; sandals and other designs were
occasionally scratched upon them. Ceilings were seemingly constructed
of whatever materials were nearest at the time. Cottonwood,
juniper, and pinyon were most frequently utilized for beams. Resting
directly upon these beams was a layer of brush, coarse grass, or cedar
bark as support for the adobe floor of the room directly above.
In contrast, Late Bonitian houses are neater and more regular.
They exhibit a superior skill in planning and execution. They disclose
three successive types of masonry, each of a quality to awaken presentday
admiration and each invariably hidden under a thin coat of
plaster. By way of ornamentation, the dado was often whitened or
Sandal designs and other figures were sometimes chalked upon, or
scratched into, the plaster. Ceilings consisted of carefully selected
pine beams supporting layers of matched poles, peeled willows or
juniper shakes, cedar bark, and adobe.
For whitewash the Late Bonitians used a soft, muddy-looking sandstone.
We found several worked pieces during the course of our
excavations, including one (U.S.N.M. No. 335637) that had been
rubbed in a liquid. This fact suggested an experiment in which we
learned that the sandstone in question readily disintegrates in water
and produces a grayish pigment identical in all outward appearances
with that employed by the ancients. At least one source of it is a
clayey pocket on the south side of Chaco Canyon, on a ledge below
Sinklezin ruin. Clearly this exposure had been worked in early times.
We unearthed a quantity of the material in a room at Pueblo del
Arroyo; Pepper (1920, p. 112) found a still larger store in Room 27,
Pueblo Bonito.
Posts lashed together at intervals with willows, and the space between
crowded with chunks of sandstone and mud, substituted for
masonry walls in several Old Bonitian houses. A superior wattlework,
one in which willows were bound horizontally to one side of the
uprights and plastered over, was utilized in Late Bonitian Room 256
in order to keep a clear passage to storeroom 257, likewise divided
by wattling.
Bonitian houses differed in other ways. The average capacity of
10 Late ground-floor rooms in the southeast quarter of the pueblo
is 1,732 cubic feet; their average ceiling height, 7 feet 10 inches. An
equal number of Old Bonitian dwellings averages 1,214.8 cubic feet
and 6 feet 8 inches, respectively.
After describing walls and roof very little remains to be said of a
Pueblo house. This was Mindeleff's conclusion (1891, p. 108) upon
completion of his Hopi studies in 1890, but it applies with equal
aptness to the houses of Pueblo Bonito, built 800 years before. Among
these latter one notes an occasional fireplace, wall pocket and storage
bin, seatings of former pole shelves and clothes racks, doors of one
sort or another, and that is about all. These architectural accessories,
so to speak, help us to an understanding of the conditions under which
the Bonitians lived day after day.
Doors.—The almost complete lack of external ground-floor doorways
is a noteworthy feature at Pueblo Bonito. There was none in
the rear cliffward wall of the original pueblo. When the Late Bonitians
arrived and constructed an encompassing tier of rooms against
even those in the second and third stories. But it was not long before
all were securely and permanently closed. In subsequent additions
the Late Bonitians omitted exterior doorways altogether.
Solid first-story walls, with movable ladders giving access to the
rooftops, were purely a defensive measure among the western Pueblos.
They continued to rely upon it until the third quarter of the nineteenth
century when United States troops brought an end to Navaho
and Apache depredations. Not until then did the Hopi and Zuñi feel
secure enough to risk ground-floor living rooms and doors opening
upon the village square.
We have record of only seven outside ground-floor doors in Old
Bonitian houses. Each gives direct access to the courtyard. Five of
them may have been cut through when later rooms were built in
front of Rooms 306, 307, 323, 325, and 326. Those in Rooms 28 and
83 possibly were in use before the outside accumulation of blown sand
necessitated the construction of steps to reach court level.
Old Bonitian doors are somewhat oval, 23 or 24 inches wide and
about 30 inches high. Adobe mud fills the corners and conceals the
rude stonework. Sill height ranges from 12 inches to 4 feet 9 inches.
The latter figure is that for the door connecting Room 325 with its
unexcavated northwest storeroom. Below the door a section of an
8-inch log, 2½ feet long, leaned against the wall as a step, supplementing
a 1½-inch-deep toehold in the plaster 35 inches above the
floor. To facilitate access to the north door of Room 325 two posts
were set in the floor, one fronting the other, forming steps 18 and
33 inches high, respectively.
A metate endwise in the floor provided a 15-inch step for the door
of Room 320. In Room 296, two protruding wall stones served a
like function. Our tabulation shows steps were required to reach 15
first-story Old Bonitian doors, but this total includes only seven in
rooms excavated by the Hyde Expedition.
Late Bonitian doors are nearer the floor, larger, and more rectangular.
Their lintels consist of selected pine poles, frequently eight in
number, of uniform diameter, peeled, and bound side by side. Where
the masonry had broken away it was noted that the outermost poles,
at least, ordinarily extended 2 feet or more on each side of the door
and thus were concealed within the stonework as the walls were rising.
Steps, if any, were posts, wall recesses, protruding stones, or blocks
of plastered masonry.
In the southwest corner of ground-floor Room 245 a cleverly contrived
door gave oblique access to the second story of Room 246.
step 2 feet high; within the doorframe a 16-inch masonry step with
hewn-plank tread halved the remaining distance. Few Bonitian housewives
succeeded so well in lessening indoor distances.
Doors diagonally through the corner of a room are peculiar to
the fourth and final phase in local architecture. We counted seven,
all but one being in the second story. That exception, connecting
Rooms 257 and 258, obviously was an afterthought, since its construction
blocked a former ventilator between Rooms 258 and 259.
Rooms 225B and 242B had two corner doors each. Pepper (1920,
p. 316) places one in the northwest corner of 99B. It is quite possible
other diagonal doors have disappeared with crumbling masonry.
T-shaped doors likewise were essentially a Late Bonitian feature.
Of 32 T-doors on our list, 17 appear in walls of third-type masonry
and 12 in those of fourth-type. Only one was noted in a second-period
wall, and that was on the east side of closet-sized Room 332, extensively
altered when Kiva U was built. We found only two T-doors
in Old Bonitian houses, and one of them, in the east wall of Room 323,
was so conspicuously framed in third-type stonework as to suggest
that it was cut through at time of construction of the room or rooms
that preceded Kiva Z.
Of our 32 T-shaped doors, 23 appear in the first story, 8 in the
second, and 1 in the third. There may well have been others, since
lost with collapse of the upper walls. Most of those still visible
originally faced one of the courts, but a few, like those in the west
walls of Rooms 226 and 227-I and that connecting third-story Rooms
174 and 175, must always have been internal. Our T-doors vary
considerably in size. That in Room 332 has a width of 18 inches for
the lower portion, 30 inches for the upper, and stood perhaps 4 feet
high. The now-blocked T-door in the southwest wall of Room 88
measured 28 and 49 inches in lower and upper width, respectively,
and was more than 6 feet high. It was contemporaneously duplicated
in the front walls of Rooms 89 and 90, next on the east. Nine T-doors,
including three in the second story, measure 45 inches or more in
maximum width.
It is a curious fact that all except the T-door in Room 109B, and
possibly that in 174C, had been carefully closed with masonry. In
most instances the blocking had been piecemeal: first, reduction to
the customary rectangular form by filling in the shoulders; perhaps
further reduction by raising the sill; then conversion into a window
or cupboard; and eventually complete closure. Our observations
provide no clue to the original purpose of T-shaped doors. The oftquoted
enter before putting down his load finds little credence with me, for
I have seen many individual burdens carried on human backs to open
doorways in Walpi, Oraibi, and Zuñi. In each instance the load was
put off outside and left there while the carrier went in unencumbered.
Storeroom doors at Pueblo Bonito were invariably equipped with
secondary lintels and slanting jambs to support a stone door, but all
others apparently remained open. During his study of Pueblo architecture,
Mindeleff (1891, p. 182) noted small poles built into doorways
a few inches below the lintel proper and assumed they were
intended to support blankets or rabbit-skin robes in cold weather.
Similar poles, singly or paired, had been provided for many of the
doors in Pueblo Bonito, but the space between them and the primary
lintels was usually filled with masonry. We observed nothing, neither
free poles nor wall pegs at lintel height, to suggest utilization of
hangings for winter protection.
Ventilators were, or once had been, present in many Bonitian
rooms, especially storerooms. Considering only those specifically
mentioned in our own field notes, tabulation shows 182 in 89 rooms.
Twelve of the rooms are Old Bonitian, nine on the ground floor and
three in the second story. Together, they have 29 ventilators, of which
11 appear in the three second-story chambers. One room alone, 317,
originally had three ventilators in its first-story northwest wall and
seven in the corresponding wall of the second story. But all 10 were
subsequently closed, presumably when Late Bonitian Room 114 was
constructed outside.
In 50 fourth-period houses we count 110 ventilators, as follows:
41 in 23 ground-floor rooms; 59 in 21 second-story rooms, and 10
in 6 third-story rooms. Here, as elsewhere, the vents lie well up
toward the ceiling and average about a foot square. A majority occur
in former storerooms, but in the course of time nearly all had been
either reduced in size or blocked entirely. Occasionally a former
door, neatly sealed and plastered over, had been left with a sort
of transom.
Windows, in our sense of the word, were unknown to the builders
of Pueblo Bonito. Whatever light entered their dwellings came
through the front door and diminished progressively as it passed
inward from one room to another. An occasional transom in an otherwise
blocked door admitted a modicum of both light and air, but a
torch must have been necessary when the innermost storerooms
were visited.
Fireplaces.—There were more than 300 ground-floor rooms in
Old Bonitian dwellings have a total of 20 fireplaces. Of 39 Late fireplaces
recorded, 31 appear in rooms of third-type construction. Circular
or oval hearths predominate over quadrangular; the ratio of
slab-lined to masonry-lined is nearly 5 to 1. Firedogs were encountered
in only four instances, all in Late Bonitian homes: tow of 3
sandstone blocks each, one of 5, and one of 2 only. In this latter
case the fireplace rim doubtless served as a third support for roundbottomed
pots. Because houses lacked chimneys, walls and ceilings
were usually smoke-stained and sooted.
Pepper (1920, p. 299) describes a hearth in the middle floor of
Room 92 (second story of 97) with only a thin layer of dried adobe
mud separating it from the brush ceiling of the room below. The
omission even of such simple safeguards as stone slabs undoubtedly
caused many a second- and third-story fire. In 1882 the upper rooms
of Hopi homes still had their floor hearths although the family cooking
was done principally on the roof of the first story (Mindeleff,
1891, p. 104).
Clothes racks.—Anticipating the modern Zuñi practice, our Bonitians
sometimes built in, at time of construction, single poles for
suspension of surplus blankets and wearing apparel. These poles invariably
crossed the lesser dimension of the room. Although we
observed the seatings for only seven examples, many others unquestionably
were once present. All seven occurred in Late Bonitian
rooms, and five of these, 200, 203, 204, 209, and 299, are of secondtype
stonework and stand in the outermost tier at the north arc of the
pueblo. The seatings averaged 5 feet 2 inches above the floor and
varied from 16 to 20 inches from the end walls. Racks suspended
from ceiling beams in the Hopi manner (Mindeleff, 1891, p. 110)
would leave no trace.
Pole shelves.—We have record of 16 pole shelves in first- and
second-story rooms originally built for storage or subsequently converted
to such use. Twelve of them are in 10 Late Bonitian houses.
The poles, 3 to 11 or more in number, had their ends firmly embedded
in the side walls at time of construction. Because masonry had been
dislodged when these poles were wrenched loose, it was not always
possible to determine the exact number.
Pole holes in the walls of Room 264 mark the positions of two
shelves each 4 feet 6 inches above the floor. That at the north end
was 7 feet in depth while the south shelf was only 5. Together, these
two pole shelves occupied 12 feet of the total room length, 17 feet
4 inches. Comparable storage facilities assuredly were provided for
third- and fourth-floor dwellings.
In Room 299 a former clothes rack 5 feet 2 inches above the floor
and 3 feet from the west wall had been converted into a shelf merely
by resting upon it a number of sticks and embedding their rear ends
in the west-wall masonry. Ceiling height here is 9 feet 9 inches.
In contrast, our records show only four pole shelves in Old Bonitian
houses and each clearly was a postconstruction feature. For example,
in Room 320 two peeled pine poles had been placed 5 inches
apart with their ends resting upon the sills of the south ventilators
and there fixed in position when the two openings were closed with
masonry. Again, at the west end of Room 298B and 3 feet 9 inches
above the floor, several building stones were removed to permit the
seating of five parallel poles whose ends were then anchored with
sandstone chips and adobe mud. A 3-pole shelf 22 inches deep was
introduced by like means into Room 315.
Lesser shelves, cupboards, and wall pegs.—In the east corner of
Room 293, where the third-type northeast wall meets the older southeast
side, a triangular shelf was formed simply by extending three
small poles across the angle. Triangular spaces above corner doorways,
an occasional projecting stone, a board set into the wall masonry, and
even irregularities left during reconstruction—all afforded a measure
of security for small objects and so were utilized as shelves.
Doors and ventilators no longer needed were closed with masonry,
usually in a manner to leave a recess on the side facing the quarters
still occupied. These recesses vary in depth from 2 to 24 inches and
are almost always neatly plastered. Lesser cupboards within the wall
masonry were left at time of construction or created subsequently by
removal of several building stones. Such receptacles often had hewn
boards for lintel or sill. Of 115 wall recesses and cupboards, irrespective
of shape or size, at least 26 are identifiable as blocked doors,
25 as blocked ventilators. All but 12 occur in Late Bonitian houses.
Slender implements such as spindles, drill shafts, and planting
sticks doubtless were thrust for safekeeping between adjacent ceiling
poles just as they are in present-day Pueblo homes. We found necklaces
and other ornaments among the fallen roof timbers of more than
one kiva.
As hangers, willow branches and antler prongs quite likely were
used more commonly than our evidence suggests. We have, for
instance, record of but 18 wall pegs, only 2 of which appear in an Old
Bonitian house and, in this case, in the same room. The east and
south walls were favored, only one peg having been noted on the
north side.
Fixed work (?) slabs.—At least one dressed sandstone slab was
houses. We have no clue to their purpose; none bore any revealing
mark and nothing was concealed beneath. One example (U.S.N.M.
No. 335898), of fine-grained sandstone smoothed on three edges and
one face, occupied the middle floor of Room 291. It measures 9½
inches wide by 11½ inches long by 1½ in maximum thickness and
appears to be part of a tabular metate. Its one unsmoothed edge had
been neatly dressed with stone hammers.
A tabular milling stone, 22½ inches wide by 26 inches long, lies
embedded in the floor of Room 300B 6½ inches from the east wall
and 8 inches from the north. Since the room itself is only 3 feet
8 inches wide, the mill in its present position could not possibly have
been used for grinding meal.
Benches, intentional and unintentional, were noted in a number
of rooms. Some resulted from constructional carelessness. When a
prepared foundation proved wider than necessary the difference appears
as an offset. Such an offset might be wider at one end than
at the other; it might, or might not, extend the entire length of the
wall. In either case the irregularity, if above floor level, became an
accepted fact and usually was turned to advantage.
In Room 309 a bench 9 inches wide and 7 inches high extends the
entire width of the chamber, 12 feet 9 inches. It had been plastered
and replastered until its 15 successive coats totaled 2 inches. At each
end a block of plastered masonry formed a lesser but superposed
shelf. In the southeast corner of Room 327 the plastered east and
south walls are abutted by a masonry bench 25 inches long, 28 inches
high, 7 inches wide at one end and 16 inches at the other. Similarly,
a triangular bench only 14 inches high but 4 feet 4 inches wide and
35 inches in maximum depth, occupies the southeast corner of
Room 333.
The rude masonry bench across the east end of Room 300 is a postHyde
Expedition relic. Jack Martin, who had freighted for Richard
Wetherill, said that Wetherill used this closet as a smokehouse. In
corroboration, there are nails in the ceiling beams and pendent baling
wire, recent smoke stains on walls and ceiling, nails in the door lintel
for support of a blanket. Room 299, next on the north, likewise
bristling with nails and wire, is unquestionably the "general storeroom"
mentioned by Pepper (1920, p. 27), for his figure 4 shows
the expedition's dining room and kitchen under construction against
the outer wall of Room 14b.
Storage rooms and bins.—Rear rooms, especially ground-floor rear
rooms, were ordinarily used for storage. They were dark and as a
with sandstone slabs, while 296 and 298 were carpeted with woodpile
chips and juniper bark. Storeroom doors invariably were provided
with secondary jambs and lintel against which a fitted stone slab
could be leaned from the outside. Nowhere did we observe incontestable
evidence that such a slab had been sealed in place with
adobe mud.
Bins occur both in storerooms and in living rooms. Some were
constructed of masonry; some of wattlework; still others were excavations
under the floor. In Room 85 Pepper (1920, pp. 270-286)
found a number of masonry bins, rudely built but provided with doors
and roofed over. In Room 78 (ibid., fig. 108, p. 261) he uncovered
a large painted water jar, buried to its middle, and two dug pits designed
to be closed with stone slabs at floor level. The four old cooking
pots we discovered under the floor of Room 128 (pl. 51, lower)
had been placed there for storage purposes. One still held a quantity
of grass seed.
During excavation of Room 266 we unexpectedly discovered five
subfloor storage pits. They averaged 4 feet 6 inches deep and 3 feet
6 inches in maximum diameter. Each was olla-shaped and its orifice
so situated that it could be covered and perhaps sealed without interfering
with normal activities in the room. Pits and bins together, our
compilation shows perhaps 13 in 5 Old Bonitian houses; 20 in 12
Late Bonitian rooms.
Mindeleff (1891, pp. 209-210) describes wall cupboards and slabsided
Hopi bins for storage of beans and small grains and, for like
purpose, a water jar buried to its neck in a masonry bench at Zuñi.
In 1881 Bourke (1884, p. 298) saw in a house at Mishongnovi
"great stores of blue and white corn, piled up separately; dried pumpkins
in long twisted strings hanging from the rafters; . . . muttontallow
in bladder casings, gourd water-jugs, . . . baskets, . . . stone
mortars, sheep pelts, rabbit-skin mantles, . . . pottery and blankets,
. . . and a supply of tortoise-shell and gourd rattles, masks, headdresses,
sashes, and other appurtenances of their dances."
From Zuñi Mrs. Stevenson (1904, p. 352) wrote a briefer but
equally clear picture: "A Zuñi storage room contains a promiscuous
mass of material ranging from objects of the most sacred character
to those of little or no value."
Such practices merely reflect an inheritance from the more-distant
past. There can be no doubt the Bonitians, like yesterday's Zuñi and
Hopi, endeavored to keep in reserve at all times at least a year's
supply of maize and other foodstuffs. This buttress against the possibility
just as comparable reserves were stored in the western pueblos 800
years later.
Furniture and furnishings.—Built-in shelves, hearths, and cupboards
have already been discussed. It remains now to present such
data as we have on movable furnishings. And that is indeed a simple
task, for in all the rooms of Pueblo Bonito we found but one piece
of furniture—a stool made from a section of pine log (pl. 66, B).
This was on the floor of Room 268 and measures 9¾ inches in diameter
by 9½ inches high. Both ends, cut with stone axes and smoothed
with sandstone abraders, remain slightly convex.
In 1883 neither the Hopi nor Zuñi considered chairs and tables
necessary house furnishings. "Small stools are sometimes seen,"
writes Mindeleff (1891, p. 213), "but the need . . . does not seem
to be keenly felt . . . Though movable chairs or stools are rare,
nearly all of the dwellings are provided with the low ledge or bench
around the rooms." If this disregard for physical comfort seems
beyond our understanding we have only to recall that chairs were
likewise unknown in the average English home until near the end of
the fifteenth century.
Lacking tables, the Bonitians served meals from one or more
earthenware bowls set out upon the living-room floor. The daily piece
de resistance undoubtedly was a stew or some sort of gruel. There
were no forks and no knives except blades of flint and obsidian. The
family simply seated itself or squatted about the food bowl—men and
boys on one side, women and children on the other—and dipped in
fingers or a scoop improvised from a bread crust or a sherd of
squash rind. It was want of tables rather than shortage of tableware
that placed the Bonitians behind contemporary Europeans in mealtime
etiquette. Even our New England forefathers ate with their
fingers. The 2-tined fork was still a novelty as late as 1700, when
wooden and pewter dishes held the cornmeal mush or the boiled meats
and vegetables that comprised the daily fare in most Colonial homes
(Dow, 1935, pp. 28-41).
Many of the earthenware vessels described in a following chapter
are of a size to suggest intended individual use. Gourd ladles and
spoons made of wood or mountain-sheep horn doubtless were at
hand. We found none in Pueblo Bonito, but they are known from
cliff dwellings of approximately the same age.
Among blown sand and fallen masonry near the floor of Room 225
we unearthed what I believe to be part of a cradle (pl. 9, B). The
relic consists of a bent willow frame over which reeds have been
one of its kind. We had a right to expect something more elaborate
from a Late Bonitian dwelling; something approaching, in form and
execution, the hooded P. III cradle recovered in the Kayenta country
by Guernsey (1931, p. 105).
Bonitian beds, to judge from remnants found with burials, consisted
of one or two thin rush mats, nothing more. For covering
there were daytime cotton garments, turkey-feather robes, and perhaps
the tanned hides of deer, antelope, and mountain sheep. Hides
and robes served also by day as living-room seats and may have been
hung over otherwise open doorways during inclement weather.
At least 3 of the 10 bodies interred in Room 320 had been laid upon
mats. Two rested side by side upon a mat made of bulrushes (Scirpus
acutus Muhl.) three-fourths of an inch wide in their present compressed
condition, fastened together at 5-inch intervals by twined
strings. The eastern edge of that burial mat partially overlay another
composed of young willow shoots 36½ inches long and less than
one-fourth inch in diameter, laid tip to butt, square cut at both ends,
with all knots abraded. The willows had been carefully peeled except
those comprising four transverse bands. Thirteen warps of 3-ply
string were threaded through holes punched 1¼ inches from each end
and at 3-inch intervals. Paraffined in the field and rolled upon a metal
cylinder for safer transportation, this mat has since been sewed to
heavy muslin with black thread (U.S.N.M. No. 335288).
A second willow mat, with nine warps only and no decorative band,
lay across the middle floor (pl. 10, A). Here, again, the damp fragile
shoots began to warp and crack, even while our photograph was being
made and, despite a hurried application of preservative, it was impossible
to remove the specimen intact. It had measured 35½ inches
wide by 53½ inches long. The larger portion, likewise stitched to
muslin with black thread, is shown on plate 10, B. These two are
the only mats in our collection not composed of some species of rush.
One fragment shows an assemblage of quarter-inch reeds, laid
parallel and sewed together in the manner described above. Ten
pieces are twilled: six in over-two-under-two technique and four in
over-three-under-three. None has a design, plain or colored, so far
as I can determine. In these 10 fragments strip width varies from
one-eighth to three-eighths inch. Plate 11, figure b, shows broad
and narrow strips alternating. Two scraps, figures f, h, have a double
selvage, joined at the inside edge. One side is formed by parallel body
elements; the other, by those at right angles. Woven in upon its
fellows, over-two-under-two, each element was folded back and to
margin.
Another fragment (U.S.N.M. No. 335312, orig. No. 1406) exhibits
a selvage wherein the plaited elements were doubled back over a string,
like a ring-basket rim, and there bound by twined cords. Plate 11, a,
shows three short sections of braided rush leaves formerly tied together
by a fine 2-ply string. Each piece measures three-eighths inch
wide and a trifle over one-eighth in thickness; each is flattened on
both sides. The three may not, of course, represent a sleeping pad
at all, but one made of rush leaves united in this manner would appear
at first thought to offer more comfort than any other we have
considered.
When Pepper first entered Room 33, a small first-story chamber
in the old northwest quarter, he observed the end of a "burial-mat"
protruding from the accumulated sand. He described it as "made
of thin osiers fastened together at three points by means of a twostrand
cord which passed through holes provided for the purpose"
(Pepper, 1909, p. 236). Another magnificent specimen, 5 feet 3
inches by 6 feet, removed from an adjacent room in 1897, is now
preserved in the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology at
Andover, Mass. My notes[2]
describe it as composed of unpeeled willow
shoots, square-cut at the ends and threaded upon nine warp cords
spaced 2 inches from each end and at intervals averaging 7¼ inches.
Each cord is knotted at its extremities and on either side of the
individual transverse elements.
These mats, together with cold hearths, broken food bowls, and
other evidence from the ruins, tell us how the Bonitians lived, ate,
and slept. Theirs seems a severe, unadorned existence. The Spartan
simplicity of their homes again reminds one of Mindeleff's (1891,
p. 108) pithy summation of Pueblo architecture: "When the walls
and roof . . . have been fully recorded, little remains to be described
about a Pueblo house."
Housewives pursued their daily tasks out of doors when possible—
making pottery, preparing food, tending babies, etc.—on the terraced
rooftops or in the courtyard below. Naked children romped, like
happy puppies, all over the place. In out-of-the-way corners of the
yard, shelters of cottonwood boughs were occasionally provided for
summertime comfort. Two such arbors are marked 286 and 310 on
our ground plan, figure 2.
Floor sweepings, kitchen refuse, and waste from household industries
the village to the community dump. Personal convenience rather than
any thought of sanitation dictated the place of deposition. Repeatedly
we found fragments of a given vessel in two or more rubbish piles;
fragments of one basket-molded bowl were retrieved from an abandoned
kiva in the East Court and from the surface of the east refuse
mound.
| The material culture of Pueblo Bonito | |