184 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
be proved nor disproved from the ruins. The number of apartments 
would not vary much whether the upper stories were symmetrically or irreg- 
ularly formed. If symmetrical, the main building contained two hundred 
and sixty apartments, and each wing seventy, making the computation for 
the latter by area and from the number of depression, still discernible, thus 
making an aggregate of four hundred rooms. 
The house was a fortress, proving the insecurity in which the people 
lived. It was also a joint tenement house of the aboriginal American model, 
indicating a plan of life not well understood. It may indicate an ancient 
communism in living, practiced by large households formed on the principle 
of kin. In such a case the communism was limited to the household as a 
part of a kinship. 
Those familiar with the remains of Indian Pueblos in ruins will recog- 
nize at once the resemblance between this pueblo and the stone pueblos in 
ruins on the Rio Chaco, in New Mexico, about sixty miles distant from these 
ruins, particularly the one called Hungo Pavie, so fully described by General 
J. H. Simpson. There is one particular in which the masonry agrees, viz., 
in the use of courses of thin stones, about half an inch in thickness, some- 
times three together, and sometimes five and six. These courses are carried 
along the wall from one side to the other, but often brokenin upon. The 
effect is quite pretty. These stones measure six inches in length by one- 
half an inch in thickness. General Simpson found the same courses of thin 
stones, and even thinner, in the Chaco ruins, and comments upon the pleas- 
ing effect they produced. 
This edifice was a credit to the skill and industry of the men among 
the Village Indians; for the men, and not the women, were the architects 
and the masons, although the women undoubtedly assisted in doing the 
work. Women brought stone and adobe and cedar, and made adobe mor- 
tar, without a doubt, as they still do. One of the hopeful features in their 
advancement was the beginning of the reversal of the old usage which put 
all labor upon the women. It is now the rule among the Village Indians 
for the men to assume the heavy work, which was doubtless the case when 
this pueblo was constructed. They cultivated maize, beans, and squashes, 
in garden beds, and irrigated them with water drawn from the river by 
