MINDELEFF. | WALL COPINGS AND ROOF DRAINS. 151 
stones to prevent the earth from sifting through. This arrangement 
was seen in a small cluster on the canyon bottom on the de Chelly. 
The small size of available roofing rafters has at Tusayan brought 
about a construction of clumsy piers of masonry in a few of the larger 
rooms, Which support the ends of two sets of main girders, and these in 
turn carry series 1, or the main ceiling beams of the roof. The girders 
are generally double, an arrangement that has been often employed in 
ancient times, as many examples occur among the ruins. The purpose 
of such arrangement may have been to admit of the abutment of the 
ends of series 1, when the members of the latter were laid in contact. 
In the absence of squared beams, 
which seem never to have been used 
in the old work, this abutment could 
only be securely accomplished by the 
use of double girders, as suggested in 
the following diagram, Fig. 38. 
The final roof covering, composed of clay, is usually laid on very care- 
fully and firmly, and, when the surface is unbroken, answers fairly well 
as a watershed. A slight slope or fall is given to the roof. This roof 
subserves every purpose of a front yard to the rooms that open upon it, 
and seems to be used exactly like the ground itself. Sheepskins are 
stretched and pegged out upon it for tanning or drying, and the char- 
acteristic Zuni dome-shaped oven is frequently built upon it. In Zuni 
generally upper rooms are provided only with a mud floor, although 
occasionally the method of paving with large thin slabs of stone is 
adopted. These are often somewhat irregular in form, the object being 
to have them as large as possible, so that considerable ingenuity is often 
displayed in selecting the pieces and in joining the irregular edges. 
This arrangement, similar to that of the kiva floors of Tusayan, is oc- 
casionally met with in the kivas. 
In making excavations at Kin-tiel, the floor of the ground room in 
which the circular door illustrated in Pl. c, was found was paved with 
large, irregular fragments of stone, the thickness of which did not aver- 
age more than an inch. Its floor, whose paving was all in place, was 
strewn with broken, irregular fragments similar in character, which must 
have been used as the flooring of an upper chamber. 
Fic. 38. Showing abutment of smaller roof 
beams over round girders. 
WALL COPINGS AND ROOF DRAINS. 
In the construction of the typical pueblo house the walls are carried 
up to the height of the roof surface, and are then capped with a contin- 
uous protecting coping of thin flat stones, laid in close contact, their 
outer edges flush with the face of the wall. This arrangement is still 
the prevailing one at Tusayan, though there is an occasional example 
of the projecting coping that practically forms a cornice. This latter 
is the more usual form at Zuni, though in the farming pueblos of Cibola 
