152 PUEBLO ARCHITECTURE. 
it does not occur with any greater frequency than at Tusayan. The 
flush coping is in Tusayan made of the thinnest and most uniform spee- 
imens of building stone available, but these are not nearly so well 
adapted to the purpose as those found in the vicinity of Zuni. 
Here the projecting stones are of singularly regular and symmetri- 
val form, and receive very little artificial treatment. Their extreme 
thinness makes it easy to trim off the projecting corners and angles, 
reducing them to such a form that they can be laid in close contact. 
Thus laid they furnish an admirable protection against the destructive 
action of the violent rains. The stones are usually trimmed to a width 
corresponding to the thickness of the walls. Of course where a pro- 
jecting cornice is built, it can be made, to some extent, to conform to 
the width of available coping stones. These can usually bé procured, 
however, of nearly uniform width. In the case of the overhanging 
cornices the necessary projection is attained by continuing either the 
main roof beams, or sometimes the smaller poles of the second series, 
according to the position of the required cornice, for a foot or more 
beyond the outer face of the wall. Over these poles the roofing is con- 
tinued as in ordinary roof construetion with the exception that the 
edge of the earth covering is built of masonry, an additional precau- 
tion against its destruction by the rains. In many places the adobe 
plastering originally applied to the faces of these cornices, as well as to 
the walls, has been washed away, exposing the whole construction. In 
some of these instances the face of the cornice furnishes a complete sec- 
tion of the roof, in which all the series of its construction can be readily 
identified. The protective agency of these coping stones is well illus- 
trated in Pl. xvi, which shows the destructive effect of rain at a point 
where an open joint has admitted enough water to bare the masonry of 
the cornice face, eating through its coating of adobe, while at the firmly 
closed joint toward the left there has been no erosive action. The much 
larger proportion of projecting copings or cornices in Zuni, as compared 
with Tusayan, is undoubtedly attributable to the universal smoothing 
of the walls with adobe, and to the more general use of this perishable 
medium in this village, and the consequent necessity for protecting the 
walls. The efficiency of this means of protecting the wall against the 
wear of weather is seen in the preservation of external whitewashing 
for several feet below such a cornice on the face of the walls. At the 
pueblo of Acoma a similar extensive use of projecting cornices is met 
with, particularly on the third story walls. Here again it is due to the 
use of adobe, which has been more frequently employed in the finish of 
the higher and newer portions of the village than in the lower terraces. 
As a rule these overhanging copings occur pricipally on the southern 
exposures of the buildings and on the terraced sides of house rows. 
When walls rise to the height of several stories directly from the ground, 
such as the back walls of house rows, they are not usually provided 
with this feature but are capped with flush copings. 
