906 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
understand, besides horticulture, the use of adobe bricks, and the art of 
constructing long joint-tenement houses, closed up in the first story for de- 
fensive reasons, and built in the terraced form two, three, and four stories 
high, the ascent to the roof of the first story being made by ladders. 
If, then, a tribe of Village Indians, with such habits and experience, 
emigrated centuries ago in search of new homes, and in course of time they, 
or their descendants, reached the Scioto Valley, in Ohio, they would find it 
impossible to construct houses of adobe bricks able to resist the rains and 
frosts of that climate, even if they found adobe soil. Some modification of 
their house architecture would be forced upon them through climatic reasons. 
They might have used stone, if possessed of sufficient skill to quarry it and 
construct walls of stone; but they did not produce such houses. Or they 
might have fallen back upon a house of inferior grade, located upon the 
level ground, such as the timber-framed houses of the Minnitarees and Man- 
dans, in which case there would have been no necessity for the embankments 
in question. Or, they might have raised these embankments of earth, inclosing 
rectangles or squares, and constructed long houses upon them, which, it is sub- 
mitted, is precisely what they did. Such houses would agree in general 
character and in plan, and in the uses to which they were adapted, with those 
of the aborigines found in all parts of America 
The elevated platform of earth as a house-site is an element in Indian 
architecture which reappears in a conspicuous manner in the solid pyra- 
midal platforms upon which the great stone structures in Yucatan and Cen- 
tral America were erected, and which sprang from the defensive and the 
communal principles in living. This latter principle required large houses 
for the accommodation of a number of families in the Lower Status of bar- 
barism, and large enough in some cases, when the people were in the Mid- 
dle Status, to accommodate an entire tribe. When adobe bricks were used 
the house was usually a single structure, three or four rooms deep and three 
or four stories high, constructed in a block, and in the nature of a fortress. 
The ground story was little used, except for storage, and they lived, prac- 
tically, upon the roof terraces. When the use of stone came in, the struct- 
ure often consisted of a main building four or five hundred feet long, and 
two wings two and three hundred feet in length, inclosing three sides of an 
