Seminole Chickee, Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia. by Evangelio Gonzalez MD
Southeast Chickees Overcame Soggy Floors
Nations in the southeast, particularly areas around the Everglades and other swampy areas, had a big problem. The ground was wet. Pretty much all the time. Living in wet, boggy territory wasn’t terrible, it meant healthy crops for these agricultural communities. Even so, it wasn’t the best thing for the wood, earth, and thatching they used for their buildings. The chickee solved this problem by lofting the floor off the ground. The platform was raised about one meter (three feet) off the ground, and secured on the framing poles, lofting it on posts to keep it from water seepage. The platform stayed dry from the wet bottom, the people stayed dry thanks to a thickly thatched, gabled roof that moved water away from them, and the chickee dwellers were comfortable enough to stay and farm the land.
Traditional style Pueblo houses in Taos, New Mexico, USA. John Fyfe (1992).
Pueblo Houses – Stacked Communities
Pueblo nations were non-migratory farmers. They built their homes to last a lifetime. While there were single family homes, the multi-family buildings are symbolic of the Pueblo style. Some of these homes were large, with up 100 rooms. Pueblo multi-family houses came in different forms. There were linear groupings, one next to another, like row housing. In other communities, houses were tiered, stacked on top of one another. The roof of one house was an entry platform to another. These earthen apartment buildings rose several stories tall. Upper levels were accessible by stairs and ladders. The lower levels were utility rooms for storage and pantries. Stacking units like this made very efficient use of the space – communities could share irrigation channels, access ladders, storage, stairs, and other neighborhood stuff. It also gave the Pueblo people their distinctive architecture.
Pueblo style buildings with thick adobe walls. Elisa.rolle (2012).
Pueblo Adobe – Natural Air Conditioning
Indigenous people in the southwest had a particular problem when developing their buildings. The desert climate is hot, dry, and not as full of the wood so abundant in other Native American regions below the Arctic. But Pueblo design found a way to make these problems work for them. They developed adobe, a mix of clay, straw, small pebbles, sand, and water. The sun baked the mix to form a mud brick. A thick plaster covered the adobe brick. Wood was scarce, but carefully used as a frame and laid to create beams, called viga, for a flat roof. The ends of the viga stick out of the wall, staying visible and giving the adobe home its distinct look. The best part? It was thick, and in a near-windowless building, it kept the heat of the day out. It was a natural air conditioning.
Dine Tsosi’s Hogan. SImeon Schwemberger (1906). Public Domain.
Southwest Hogan – An Earthen Sculpture
Navajo people of the southwest notably used the hogan, a variation of the pit houses used in other regions. The pit was shallow, only .6 to 1 meters (roughly 2-3 feet) deep, and framed in a circle or semi-circle. The Navajo settled in areas where pinon pine trees were more abundant than their pueblo-building neighbors. They used the pines to frame the houses and create stacked log walls on the hogan. The roof is a corbeled domed, created by stacking logs closer and closer together. Earth, baked mud, sod, reeds, and (much more rarely) carved stone covered the dome. A smoke hole in the dome provided fresh air and ventilation. This kept water out, but also naturally cooled the building. The space was a single room, without walls or dividers. These walls had sculpted-earth benches along them for seating and storage. But the Hogan is especially notable for its spiritual connection.
Navajo family and their hogan, 1915. DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University
Southwest Hogan were Spiritual
The Hogan wasn’t just an ordinary home, it is connected to the spirits of First Man and First Woman. In Navajo tradition, the pair completed a migration around three underworlds. The Supreme Being greeted First Man and First Woman at the end of their journey. He showed them a house shaped like a mountain. This was the “heart of the earth.” The Supreme Being showed them another house that looked more like a butte, calling this the “lungs of the earth.” The hogan is based on the Heart of the Earth and the Lungs of the Earth. The shape varies, but the spiritual connection does not. When a hogan’s construction is complete, there is a dedication ceremony honoring the journey of the First Man and First Woman.
Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito. SkybirdForever (2010).
Full-Service Urbanized Areas
Popular discussion of Native American communities overlooks the large, urbanized cities, with houses, shopping, multi-story buildings, roads and dedicated paths, and government. These were trade centers built near riverways for ease of transportation and abundance of resources. Traders from many regions and communities would share goods, ideas, technologies, and spirituality with cities along these riverways. The architecture of these cities reflects the Native American tradition of using locally sourced materials. Cities also used the common architectural styles of their region. For instance, the city of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico reflects the adobe Pueblo style of the nearby territory. While culturally the cities weren’t much different than smaller villages and hamlets , they were larger, more densely populated. They had to provide services to more people. Cities had to plan for things like water, waste disposal, roads, and other functions on a much larger scale than smaller communities.
Chaco Canyon Great House digital reconstruction. National Park Service.
Southwest City: Chaco Canyon Great Houses
The city of Chaco Canyon, in present day New Mexico, was a cosmopolitan trade hub from about 850 CE to 1250CE. Trade was critical – Chaco Canyon sat on in salty, infertile soil. Most of the food had to be imported, and Chaco Canyon became a regional economic center connected to other cities by roads and irrigation systems, some 15 miles long. Their sophistication showed in architecture. They built unique semi-circular stone buildings with hundreds of rooms tucked into its five or six stories. These buildings are called great houses, even though nobody lived in them. They were more like ancient office buildings and shops. The particularly unique thing about these huge complexes is that they didn’t start as small buildings and have add-ons over the years. Archaeologists believe the Great Houses, about 150 of them in all, were planned to be large from the start.
On a Slant Village. Mandan On-a-Slant Village, North Dakota. George Will (1924)
Plains: Earth Lodge Clusters in On-a-Slant Village
Earth lodges provided solid permanent housing for people of the Eastern Plains. These lodges clustered together to create thriving agricultural communities along waterways. The rive gave them a chance to not only provide for their own needs, but trade, too. The farms produced a surplus for trade, and from 900 CE on, eastern Plains farming communities engaged in long-distance trade. One community, the Mandan nation’s On-a-Slant Village housed seventy-five to eighty tightly-placed earth lodges clustered around a central plaza. On-a-Slant village was built along a river bluff, which gave them the defensive advantage of being able to watch the river for attackers. Additionally, the city had a high wall around its perimeter to protect them from an overland attack. The defenses and trading allowed On-a-Slant Village to reach a population of about 1,000 people. It flourished for about 200 years until the 1780s, when smallpox ravaged its population.
Three Hidatsa villages in Knife River area by Mandan Sitting Rabbit (1907). Public Domain.
Big Hidatsa Village
In 1600 CE, the Plains Hidatsa people settled a river bluff area near the Knife River in what is now North Dakota. The population of 820 to 1200 people clustered in 120 earth lodges together to form a village of about 820 to 1,200 people. The earth lodges in the community could hold 20 to 30 people, making each lodge a small community within itself. Big Hidatsa Village had suburbs, the Lower Hidatsa Village (Awatixa Xi’e), and Awatixa. Hidatsa Village and its suburbs were agricultural trade centers, but are best known for diplomacy. They facilitated trade between traders coming from the Minnesota region to the nations in the west, they were the home of one of the most well-known guides in history. Sakakawea lived in one of the Hidatsa villages prior to her work with the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Plains Region: Chicago wasn’t the first grand city in Illinois!
Near East St, Louis, Illinois, visitors can climb the central staircase on a giant, grass-covered earthen mound. What looks like a big hill with stairs is actually the physical remains of a city. Between 1000 and 1350 CE, the city of Cahokia was home to an estimated 10,000 to 20,000, and if its suburbs are included, 40,000 to 50,000 people. Cahokia was a farming community that specialized in maize production, but also served as a trade and government center, and a scientific community. The city had everything a city needed, including natural and man-made water systems and roads. The ever-important central plaza held festivals and ceremonies that make city life exciting. In their off time, Cahokians could head to a play area and enjoy a game of Chunkey, where they would aim spears at disc-shaped, rolling stones. Looming over the city like a watchful friend was Monks Mound.
Monks Mound. Department of Transportation, FHA. Public Domain.
Monks Mound, Cahokia
The National Park Service calls Monks Mound, built around 900 CE, the “largest indigenous structure north of Mexico.” The mound’s base was 291 by 236 meters (954.7 by 774.3 feet). This means the base is larger than the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt. But unlike its minimalist, smooth-sided Egyptian relative, it had four terraces as it climbed toward the sky. Monks Mound was an organic earthen mound, unlike their stone-built Egyptian cousins. Each tier was slightly smaller than the one beneath it. It was the original Community Center; it was a foundational platform for public buildings, burial mounds. Some of the terraces had gardens. Despite the name, there were no monks living on the mound in Cahokia’s heyday. The name refers to the Trappist monks who lived near it in the 1800s. Remarkably, Monks Mound was the tallest man-made structure in the United States until 1867.
Scotland has Stonehenge, Cahokia has Woodhenge. Woodhenge was, historically, an observatory for watching the sun, moon, and star cycles, built on land once used for houses in the early Emergent Mississippian era. There were five observatories at Cahokia. Wood posts, made of sacred red cedar reached toward the sky. The resulting shadows provided scientific data the people needed for their studies and to properly time religious ceremonies and agricultural cycles. The five observatories were probably built at different times because each Woodhenge had a larger diameter and twelve more posts than the one it overlapped. Woodhenge 1 had twenty-four posts. The last Woodhenge, Woodhenge 5 had 72 posts. Archaeologists believe Woodhenge 1 was built in 900 CE, was in use for much of Cahokia’s history, then just stopped being used around 1100 CE. Woodhenge likely returned to its original residential use, based on archaeology at the site.
Cahokia Monks Mound today. Steven Greenwell (2018).
The Fall of Cahokia
Nobody knows why Cahokia was abandoned in the mid to late 1300s, but historians think it might be a combination of things like disease, warfare, conflict, trouble with the watershed and depleted wood resources. Faith in leadership plummeted. There would have been fights over the (increasingly scarce) good land, and warfare between communities. Cahokia built wooden palisades for protection against these new threats. The city’s’ population moved on, joining other Native American communities and evolved into groups like the Osage, leaving the bustling urban center a mere memory. Seventy mounds remain out of the known original 120, but the most formidable by far was Monks Mound. The city wasn’t suddenly, catastrophically abandoned. That is pretty rare in city evolution. Historians believe it followed a pattern of urban decline, where little things, and time, reduce a city’s purpose and usefulness.
Native American Architecture is a Modern Inspiration
What makes Native American architecture amazing is its template for modern designers. The buildings were sustainable, but also very sturdy, waterproof, and kept cool (or warm) using natural, not mechanized means. These ideas are consistent for every region, from the Arctic to Southwest, from small, migratory bands to the urban centers like Cahokia and Chaco Canyon. The design was often compact rather than clearing great swaths of land for housing and made use of the materials nearby for construction. True, some of these materials are less sustainable that others, particularly the loss of ancient redwoods in California, but that was an exception. Native American architecture is complex, with a huge variety in styles, details, decorative details, and spiritual meaning. Archaeologists are continuously finding new information about Native American buildings. But more important, architectural traditions live on with the Native American people. These traditions are passed down through generations.
