204 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
five hundred persons, makes an Indian village. Two or three such houses, 
as at Taos and Santo Domingo, form a large pueblo; anda group of several 
such houses, as at Zuni, a pueblo of the largest size, which once contained 
perhaps five thousand persons, now reduced to fifteen hundred. There are 
no reasons for supposing that any pueblo in Yucatan or Central America con- 
tained as high a number as ten thousand inhabitants at the period of the 
Spanish conquest, although these countries were extremely favorable for 
an increase of Indian population. Their villages were numerous and small. 
Castaneda, who accompanied the expedition of Coronado to New Mexico in 
1540-1542, estimated the population of the seventy villages visited by detach- 
ments and situated between the Colorado River, Zuni, and the Arkansas at 
twenty thousand men, which would give a total population in this wide 
area of a hundred thousand Indians.'| There were seven villages each of 
Cibola, Tusayan, Quivira, and Hemes, and twelve of Tiguex; it would give 
an average of about fourteen hundred and fifty persons to each village. In 
all probability these are fair samples as to the number of inhabitants of the 
villages of the Mound-Builders, with exceptional cases, as the village on 
the site of Marietta, in Ohio, where there may have been five thousand, if 
an impression may be formed from the extent of the earth-works occupied 
in the manner hereafter suggested. Where several villages were found near 
each other on the same stream, as in New Mexico, the people usually spoke 
the same dialect, which tends to show that those in each group were colo- 
nists from one original village. 
The earth-works of the Mound-Builders must be regarded as the sites 
of their villages. The question then recurs, for what purpose did they raise 
these embankments at an expenditure of so much labor? They must have 
lived somewhere, in, upon, or around them. No answer has been given to 
this question, and no serious attempt has been made to explain their uses. 
They have been called “defensive enclosures”; but it is not supposable that 
they lived in houses within the embankments, for this would turn the places 
into slaughter-pens in case of an attack. Some of them have been ealled 
“saered enclosures”, but this goes for nothing apart from some knowledge 
of their uses. They were constructed for a practical, intelligent purpose, 
‘Coll. Ternanx-Compans, vol. ix, pp. 181-183. 
