Ch.3: Pre-Chacoan Architecture

URBAN GENESIS AT CHACO: Case Study of the Origin of Civilizations. Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6

3.2 Pit-houses

The Pueblo architectural tradition begins around ad 400 with the pithouse. The figure at left is an excellent reconstruction of this type of house (so it is included here, complete with caption). Pithouses are either circular or sub circular in plan, and about 4.5-5 meters in diameter. The floors are dug to a depth of about one half meter below the surrounding grade, or down to bedrock if the soil is shallow. Floors were either left bare and compacted through use, or surfaced with clay (Cordell 1984:218). In early pithouses the below-grade walls were left bare. By the end of the seventh century, the lower walls were lined with upright slabs of stone; and by the end of the ninth century, the stone was laid in horizontal courses. Pithouses were roofed with wattle-and-daub or sticks and brush supported on a framework of poles. The exact form of this framework is unknown, since the construction materials were ephemeral. Remnants of pithouse roofs have only been preserved in rare instances when pithouses were destroyed by fire (Cordell 1984:222). Fire chars wood and prevents it from rotting away, but fire also destroys the arrangement of the structure in the process of carbonizing it. However, the pattern of impressions found in pithouse floors indicates a few different framework arrangements: either two poles supporting a ridge beam with smaller poles leaned against it in an A-frame, or a four-poster frame which supports a small flat roof with side walls made of smaller poles leaned in against the outside of the frame. The latter arrangement was most common in the Chaco region (Bullard 1962). The roofs of early pithouses seem to have been a series of upright poles seated around the rim of the pit, leaned together, and enclosed with a covering of clay mud and brush. The roofs of later pithouses rested on a four-post frame.

The form of the pit-house was elaborated and refined over time. Within later pit-houses low walls were used to subdivide the space into a larger rear chamber and a smaller antechamber or 'vestibule.' According to Cordell, "Metates have been found set into the floor in the smaller, vestibular area, suggesting that this part of the house served as a kitchen and food preparation area" (Cordell 1984).

Pit-House at Chaco Canyon
Reproduced (including caption) from Linda Cordell,
"Prehistory: Eastern Anasazi" in Handbook of the North American Indians
(Washington: Smithsonian, 1979) vol. IX, p. 135

The Dwelling Site: More Than Just a Pithouse

Several other features were associated with pithouses, one being the deposit mounds. Often the dead were placed here, along with broken pottery, animal bones, ash, and other domestic byproducts. Alfonso Ortiz' account of the sacred-spatial organization of Oke'onwi (San Juan Pueblo) indicates the attitude of present-day Pueblo people toward similar mounds: "three of the [four cardinal] shrines are located in the middle of refuse dumps. This follows from the ancient Pueblo practice, as noted in the origin myth, of burying the dead near the village." (Ortiz 1969:20) Pithouse-dwellers located their mounds to the south or southeast of the pithouse, outside of the front door.

The need to store food produced the second set of features. Food containers evolved from sub-floor pits and cists within the house to large, above-ground bins made of stone slabs. Plain pits seem to be the oldest form, appearing with the earliest pithouses. Over the next century these pits came to be lined with stone or clay (Cordell 1984:222). By the sixth century pithouse-dwellers had switched to storing food in ceramic vessels, probably to keep out insects and burrowing rodents (Cordell 1984:213). Both the relative advantage of ceramic vessels for long-term food storage and the relative importability of ceramics are signs that the people were becoming more settled, and able to use a less portable material culture. By the seventh century, above-ground bins were being built of stone slabs, both to keep out pests and perhaps to keep the maize dry. These above-ground bins later formed both the nucleus and the architectural precedent for above-ground, rectilinear masonry construction. The function of above-ground storage rooms persisted well into the nineteenth century: the ground floor rooms of Historic Pueblos continued to be used primarily for the storage of grain. Among the Hopi and the Western Keres at least, only the upper stories of a house-block were inhabited as domestic spaces.

The third feature associated with pit-houses is delineated only by a zone of tamped earth and an occasional firepit: it is the outdoor common area. Much, if not most of daily life took place outside of the structure itself. The rooftop terraces of later multi-story dwellings fulfilled a similar social role, at least in domestic functions as the outdoor component of the dwelling. On the other hand, the public functions of this common space would eventually give rise to the plaza.