vi PREFACE. 
houses will be seen to form one system of works, from the Long House of 
the Iroquois to the Joint Tenement houses of adobe and of stone in New 
Mexico, Yucatan, Chiapas, and Guatemala, with such diversities as the dif- 
ferent degrees of advancement of these several tribes would naturally pro- 
duce. Studied as one system, springing from a common experience, and 
similar wants, and under institutions of the same general character, they 
are seen to indicate a plan of life at once novel, original, and distinctive. 
The principal fact, which all these structures alike show, from the 
smallest to the greatest, is that the family through these stages of progress 
was too weak an organization to face alone the struggle of life, and sought 
a shelter for itself in large households composed of several families. The 
house for a single family was exceptional throughout aboriginal America, 
while the house large enough to accommodate several families was the rule. 
Moreover, they were occupied as joint tenement houses, There was also a 
tendency to form these households on the principle of gentile kin, the 
mothers with their children being of the same gens or clan. 
If we enter upon the great problem of Indian life with a determination 
to make it intelligible, their house life and domestic institutions must fur- 
nish the key to its explanation. These pages are designed as a commence- 
ment of that work. It is a fruitful, and, at present, but partially explored 
field. We have been singularly inattentive to the plan of domestic life 
revealed by the houses of the aboriginal period. ‘Time and the influences 
of civilization have told heavily upon their mode of life until it has become 
so far modified, and in many cases entirely overthrown, that it must be 
taken up as a new investigation upon the general facts which remain. At 
the epoch of European discovery it was in full vitality in North and South 
America; but the opportunities of studying its principles and its results 
were neglected. As a scheme of life under established institutions, it was 
a remarkable display of the condition of mankind in two well marked 
ethnical periods; namely, the Older Period and the Middle Period of 
barbarism; the first being represented by the Iroquois and the second by 
the Aztecs, or ancient Mexicans. In no part of the earth were these two 
conditions of human progress so well represented as by the American 
Indian tribes. A knowledge of the culture and of the state of the arts of 
