514 PREHISTORIC VILLAGES IN TENNESSEE [erH. ANN. 41 
Traveling Indians, having no relations in the town, often sleep in the public 
square as they are passing on their journey. This is one of their ancient rites 
of hospitality. And poor old men and women, suffering for want of clothes, are 
entitled to sleep in the hothouses of the town they live in, if they please. 
The square is the place for all public meetings and the performance of all their 
principal warlike and religious ceremonies. 
* * * * * * * 
Each square, as necessary appendages, has a hothouse at the northwest corner 
of it and a May-pole, with a large circular beaten yard around it, at the south- 
west corner, which is called the ‘‘chunkey yard.” These two places are chiefly 
appropriated to dancing. The yard is used in warm and the hothouse in cold 
weather. 
The hothouse is a perfect pyramid of about 25 feet high on a circular base of 
the same diameter. The walls of it are of clay, about 6 feet high, and from thence 
drawn regularly to a point at the top and covered round with tufts of bark. 
Inside of the hothouse is one broad circular seat made of canes and attached to 
the walls all around. The fire is kindled in the center, and the house, having 
no ventilator, soon becomes intolerably hot; yet the savages, amidst all the 
smoke and dust raised from the earthen floor by their violent manner of dancing, 
bear it for hours together without the least apparent inconvenience. 
That mound B most likely supported a hothouse or winter council 
house is also borne out by Bartram’s description of some of the Creek 
towns seen by him shortly before 1789. Referring to earth works of 
the ancients which shortly before 1789 were still being used by the 
then existing Creeks, he states: 
B, a circular eminence at one end of the [chunkey] yard, commonly 9 or 10 
feet higher than the ground round about. Upon this mound stands the great 
Rotunda, Hot House, or Winter Council House of the present Creeks. It was 
probably designed and used by the ancients who constructed it for the same 
purpose.!% 
He also shows, on the same page, that the chunkey yard had a 
“chunk” pole erected in the center of the yard and two “slave posts,” 
one at each of two corners of the chunkey yard. His diagram of this 
rotunda or hothouse is reproduced in Figure 128, with the following 
explanation: 
B, the rotunda; A, the door opening toward the square; the three circular lines 
show the two rows of seats, sofas, or cabins, the punctures show the poles or 
columns which support the building; C, the great central pillar or column, sur- 
rounded by the spiral fire, which gives light to the house. 
HOUSE CIRCLE NO. 3 
Lack of funds prevented excavation of as many of the 87 house 
circles as was desirable. Circles Nos. 3, 20, 23, 42, 18, 79, and 84 
were therefore selected. These represented every section of the town, 
and probably many types of occupants, and thus were likely to yield 
widely different information. 
18 Bartram’s Creek and Cherokee Indians, in Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, vol. 
Ill, part 1, p. 52. 
14 Bartram, ibid., p. 54. 
