626 ANNUAL, REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



Traeger and Bruun have pointed out that a Saharan town like 

 Medinine is architecturally an imitation in relief of the subterranean 

 village, Matmata, one being above the other under ground. In the 

 southwest there is a similar relation of the cave dwelling and the 

 pueblo built in the open. 



The relative age of Matmata and Medinine, as representing the 

 African troglodyte and a village in the open, may aid us in deter- 

 mining the relative age of the cliff houses or rooms in artificial 

 caves and the pueblos. Traeger regards the dwellings underground 

 as constituting the older or the original form, and it would seem 

 that the same is also true in the New World where there is evidence 

 that the cavate rooms are older than the pueblos. The existence of 

 several-storied dwellings in the Sahara and in our Southwest are 

 explained as follows. The limited capacity of the caves in America 

 had so crowded together the inhabitants that they were compelled to 

 construct rooms one above another, a condition of congestion which 

 survives in the pueblo. The multiple-storied Berber villages in 

 the open have a pueblo form for the same reason. 



The Tunisian pueblos are inhabited by the Berbers, an aborig- 

 inal people of North Africa, whose ancestors, there is every reason 

 to believe, lived in similar habitations in the earliest historic times. 

 In fact, it is not impossible that the very people now inhabiting 

 them are descendants of those who lived there in the time of Strabo 

 or Sallust. It would appear that a residence for centuries in this 

 peculiar form of dwelling may have led to certain habits of life 

 which they share with our pueblos. It is foreign to the purpose 

 of my address to enter into any intimate comparison of the culture 

 of the sedentary prehistoric aborigines of the desert region of 

 Africa with those of our Southwest, but it may not be out of place 

 to state en passant that there are deep-seated similarities in their 

 customs, arts, and institutions, which are heritages of a cave life. 

 Instructive parallels, for instance, might be detected in house owner- 

 ship, matriarchal rights, and clan descent between the two. It would 

 be strange if their ideas of building were not alike. 



To-day,* as of old, the Berber tribes are distinct from the nomads 

 and are reputed to live in stone-built hill villages with two-storied 

 houses, 1 in marked contrast to the nomadic Arabs, who dwell in 

 towns of tents. According to Ratzel, in villages of the western Atlas 

 "the greater part of the upper story consists of a sort of rough 

 veranda ill suited to the severe climate of that mountain country. 

 * * * The natives pass the winter in cellarlike vaults beneath the 

 houses; and for the sake partly of warmth, partly of defense, the 

 houses are built so close together that they often produce the im- 



1 The upper story of a Kabyle village is ordinarily added after the marriage of a son. 



