JUDD— USE OF ADOBE 



(pi. iv) in order that each layer might become fairly dry and hard, and 

 thus able to resist the weight of an equal amount in a superposed 

 course. Vertical joints occur frequently in the walls of some buildings, 

 but it does not appear that they represent a serious desire on the part 

 of the builders to divide each layer into blocks of even approximately 

 uniform length. 



Houses with walls which seem to have been erected in the same 

 manner as those near Beaver City have been observed also in many 

 sections of New Mexico and Arizona, 1 but doubt remains as to 

 whether they possess any features not already found elsewhere. 



Since adobe is most easily worked while still plastic, the faces of 

 the mud walls in these houses were carefully smoothed during the 

 process of construction, and it is only reasonable to suppose that the 

 top of each new layer received like treatment at the same time. That 

 some of these courses should not be entirely level and of uniform 

 thickness is readily understood when one recalls that the builders 

 were unfamiliar with even our simpler instruments of precision, and 

 that frames or forms of fixed width were not utilized. Careful exami- 

 nation of the adobe walls in these houses indicates that each course 

 was allowed to dry before an additional layer was placed upon it. The 

 infrequent occurrence of thin layers suggests, as noted by Mindeleff 

 at Casa Grande, an effort on the part of the builders to overcome their 

 inability to hold straight lines in adding consecutive courses. 



Almost without exception the adobe-walled dwellings in the 

 Beaver City mounds were paved with clay mud over a layer of 

 rounded, water-worn stones. In a few houses fireplaces with rims of 

 adobe had been cut through the floor level. It seems certain, however, 

 that most of the cooking was done outside the houses. 



More than twenty unconnected adobe structures were exposed at 

 Beaver City, yet none of them contained the slightest evidence that 

 their builders had been familiar with lateral doorways or openings. 

 Charred remains of wooden beams, and countless fragments of roof- 

 ing clay, bearing impressions of large timbers, sticks, and grass, indi- 

 cated that each house had been roofed in the manner most common 

 to primitive pueblo structures in the Southwest. The frequent occur- 

 rence, usually on the surface, of thin stone discs averaging nearly 

 thirty inches in diameter, suggests their use as coverings for roof 

 entrances to these single-roomed, adobe dwellings. 



The writer has attempted, in the foregoing pages, to remind the 



1 Bandelier in Fifth Ann. Rep. Archaeol. Inst. Amer., 1884; also his Final Report, 1892. Hough 

 in Bull. 35, B. A. E., 1907. Nelson in Anthr. Papers Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. 15, pt. I, 1914. 

 Morris in Amer. Anthr., vol. 17, no. 4, p. 668, 1915. 



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