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MORGAN. ] HOUSES ADAPTED TO COMMUNISM IN LIVING. 105 
inferences with respect to the social condition and the degree of advance- 
ment of these tribes have been constantly drawn from it both fallacious and 
deceptive, when the plain truth would have been more creditable to the abo- 
rigines. It will be my object to give an interpretation of this architecture 
in harmony with the usages and customs of the Indian tribes. The houses of 
the different tribes, in ground-plan and mechanism, will be considered and 
compared, in order to show wherein they represent one system. 
A common principle, as before stated, runs through all this architecture, 
from the “long-house” of the Iroquois to the “ pueblo houses” of New 
Mexico, and to the so-called “palace” at Palenque, and the ‘ House of the 
Nuns” at Uxmal. It is the principle of adaptation to communism m living, 
restricted in the first instance to household groups, and extended finally to 
all the inhabitants of a village or encampment by the law of hospitality. 
Hunger and destitution were not known at one end of an Indian village 
while abundance prevailed at the other. Joint-tenement houses, each occu- 
pied by one large household, as among the Iroquois, or by several house- 
hold groups, as in Yucatan, were the natural and inevitable result of their 
usages and customs. Communism in living and the law of hospitality, it 
seems probable, accompanied all the phases of Indian life in savagery and 
1 barbarism. These and other facts of their social condition embodied 
themselves in their architecture, and will contribute to its elucidation. 
The house architecture of the Northern tribes is of little importance, 
in itself considered; but, as an outcome of their social condition and for 
comparison with that of the Southern Village Indians, it is highly important. 
An attempt will be made to show, firstly, that the known communism in 
living of the former tribes entered into and determined the character of 
their houses, which are communal; and, secondly, that wherever the struc- 
tures of the latter class are obviously communal, the practice of commun- 
ism in living at the period of discovery may be inferred from the structures 
themselves, although many of them are now in ruins, and the people who 
constructed them have disappeared. Some evidence, however, of the com- 
munism of the Village Indians has been presented. 
