912 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
as steps, and which could be taken up at night; also one of the doors by 
which the house was entered. 
It is not necessary, as before suggested, that the actual form and struct- 
ure of the houses of the Mound-Builders should be shown to establish the 
hypothesis that these embankments were the veritable sites of their houses. 
If it is made evident that the summit platforms of these embankments, 
when reformed from their own materials, would afford practicable sites for 
houses, which when constructed would have been comfortable dwellings 
adapted to the climate and to Indian life in the Middle Status of barbarism, 
this is all that can be required. The restoration of this pueblo establishes 
the affirmative of this proposition, with the superadded confirmation of that 
defensive character which marks all the house architecture of the Village 
Indians in New and Old Mexico and Central America. 
With their undoubted advancement beyond the Iroquois and Minnita- 
rees, the Mound-Builders may have constructed better houses upon these 
platform elevations than the plans indicate. No remains of adobes have 
been found in connection with these embankments, and nothing to indicate 
that walls of such brick had ever been raised upon them. The disinte- 
grated mass would have shown itself in the form of the embankment after 
the lapse of many centuries. On the contrary, they were found in the pre- 
cise form they would have assumed, under atmospheric influences, after 
structures of the kind described had perished, and the embankments had 
been abandoned for centuries. 
These embankments, therefore, require triangular houses of the kind 
described, and long-houses, as well, covering their entire length. But the 
interior plan might have been different; for example, the passage way might 
have been alcng the exterior wall, and the stalls or apartments on the court 
side; and but half as many in number; and, instead of one continuous 
house in the interior, four hundred and fifty feet in length, it might have 
been divided into several, separated from each other by cross partitions. 
The plan of life, however, which we are justified in ascribing to them, from 
known usages of Indian tribes in a similar condition of advancement, would 
lead us to expect large households formed on the basis of kin, with the 
practice of communism in living in each household, whether large or small. 
