fewkes] PREHISTORIC VILLAGES, CASTLES, AND TOWERS 69 



conservative, or less liable to innovation or departure from pre- 

 scribed forms and methods. These community houses express the 

 thought of men in groups at different times, and, so far as archeology 

 teaches, are the best exponents of what we call contemporary social 

 conditions, while pottery and other small portable objects, being prod- 

 ucts of individual endeavor, furnish little on social organization, or 

 general cultural conditions of communities. Although determination 

 of cultural areas built on identity of pottery often coincides with 

 those determined by buildings, this is not always the case. Special- 

 ized culture areas determined by highly conventionalized designs on 

 ceramics are localized, more numerous, and as a rule more modern. 

 Hence a culture area determined by architectural features may include 

 several sub areas determined by pottery. 



The author has thought it possible to differentiate two distinct 

 epochs or phases of house building in the upper part of the San Juan 

 drainage, viz, the early and the middle stages of development. There 

 are included in the early condition certain crude architectural efforts 

 similar to the non-Pueblos represented in regions adjoining the Pueblo 

 area. This early condition, though not clearly defined, is begin- 

 ning; to be revealed by intensive studies of the so-called slab-house 

 dwellings and isolated brush houses. Evidences of this stage have 

 been found in several localities, as on McElmo Bluff, or combined 

 with walls of what may be called true pueblo buildings. The dif- 

 ferences between some of the buildings of the early stage and those 

 of the aborigines in southern California, or of the Utes and Shoshonean 

 tribes, are slight; resemblances which point to relations are not 

 considered in detail. 



From their advance in house building, it has been commonly 

 stated that the Pueblo people were either derived from Mexican 

 tribes or, as was customary in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies to suppose, their descendants had made their way south and 

 developed into the more advanced Mexican culture as the Aztecs. 

 These conclusions are not supported by comparison with available 

 architectural data observed among these two peoples. The basal 

 error is the mistake in considering the earth houses of the Gila the 

 same as pueblos. The habitations of the Gila compounds were 

 structurally different from pueblos, and their sanctuaries or ceremo- 

 nial rooms had not the same form or relation to the dwellings. The 

 Gila compounds are allied to Mexican buildings; but there is little 

 in common between them and pure pueblos. The same is true of 

 the type of stone dwellings on the Verde, Ton to, and Little Colorado. 

 Certain likenesses exist between the Casas Grandes of the Gila and 

 those of Mexico, although little relationship exists between the tem- 

 ples or ceremonial buildings of the valley of Mexico and the Casas 

 Grandes of the Gila. The architecture of the Pueblos and the Az- 



