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Adobe Bricks in a Pre-Spanish Wall near Aztec, New Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Earl H. Morris*
Affiliation:
Boulder, Colorado

Extract

For a full thousand years before the conquest, peoples of the Pueblo area of the American Southwest manipulated adobe clay to meet their architectural needs with marked cleverness and skill. In the dim beginning, they used it to stop the cracks of their slab-lined storage cists against rodents and trickling sand. Later, they applied stout crusts of it over the thatch that covered the pole walls and roofs of their singleroomed dwellings. Later still, they learned to make independent walls of it. Usually these were built up layer by layer much as were pottery vessels of the day. But occasionally they were made of “turtlebacks,” which, though of pure clay in rare instances, customarily'consisted of a core of twigs or other vegetation encased in mud. At their architectural zenith, the Pueblo raised massive adobe structures of pise-like appearance in localities where good stone was absent or hard to obtain and used it universally for mortar in stone construction, as well as for floors, plaster and roof covering.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1944

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References

Douglass, A. E. 1929. “The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings.” National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 56, pp. 736770.Google Scholar
Fewkes, Jesse Walter 1911. Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park: Cliff Palace. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 51.Google Scholar
Judd, Neil M. 1916. “The Use of Adobe in Prehistoric Dwellings of the Southwest.” Holmes Anniversary Volume. Washington.Google Scholar