214 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
apartments in the pueblo of Chetro Kettle, in New Mexico, now in ruins, 
including those in the several stories, is four thousand seven hundred feet. 
It contained probably about the same number of inhabitants. 
The foregoing explanation of the uses of these embankments rests 
upon the defensive principle in the house architecture of the Village 
Indians, and upon a state of the family requiring joint-tenement houses 
communistic in character. To both of these requirements this conjectural 
restoration of one of the pueblos of the Mound-Builders responds in a 
remarkable manner. In the diversified forms of the houses of the Village 
Indians, in all parts of America, the defensive principle is a constant fea- 
ture. Among the Mound-Builders a rampart of earth ten feet high around 
a village would afford no protection; but surmounted with long-houses, 
the walls of which rose continuous with the embankments, the strength of 
these walls, though of timber coated with earth, would render a rampart 
thus surmounted and doubled in height a formidable barrier against Indian 
assault. The second principle, that of communism in living in joint-tene- 
ment houses, which is impressed not less clearly upon the houses of the 
Village Indians in general than upon the supposed houses of the Mound- 
Builders, harmonized completely with the first. From the two together 
sprang the house architecture of the American aborigines, with its diversi- 
ties of form, and they seem sufficient for its interpretation. The Mound- 
Builders in their new area east of the Mississippi, finding it impossible to 
construct joint-tenement houses of adobe bricks to which they had been 
accustomed, substituted solid embankments of earth in the place of the first 
story closed up on the ground, and erected triangular houses upon them 
covered with earth. When circumstances compelled a change of plan, the 
second is not a violent departure from the first. There is a natural con- 
nection between them. Finally, it is deemed quite sufficient to sustain the 
interpretation given, that these embankments were eminently adapted to 
the uses indicated; and that the pueblo as restored, and with its inclosed 
court, would have afforded to its inhabitants pleasant, protected, and 
attractive homes. 
With respect to the large circular inclosures, adjacent to and communi- 
cating with the squares, it is not necessary that we should know their 
