Architecture: American Indian

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Architecture: American Indian

The founders of the American Republic were well aware that they were latecomers to North America and were relatively modest in their architectural achievements. The largest buildings seen by George Washington were built by American Indians along the Ohio River. The most complex geometric construction known to Thomas Jefferson was reported to him from the same area in the 1770s, and it is likely that his octagons and earthen dependencies at Poplar Forest near Lynchburg, Virginia, acknowledged the example of the Hopewell people of Ohio. Jefferson, a preeminent neoclassicist, had no way of knowing that their work dated from the classical period, 400 b.c. to a.d. 400. The wonderment felt by Albert Gallatin amid the giant earthen cones at the headwaters of the Ohio River permeated his entire intellectual life. After he founded the American Ethnological Society of New York, he lived to learn of the great pueblos of the Rio Grande valley. Though much has been lost in the intervening years, enough is left to teach us what these men knew, and a little more besides.

large structures

The American Indians built tens of thousands of large structures of earth, stone, timber, and adobe in a great building boom from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. They started just before the Scandinavians established American beachheads and sustained their pace until a mysterious, continentwide folk wandering (to borrow a European term) produced a cessation of monumental building and evacuations of areas rich in architecture such as Cahokia, Illinois; St. Louis; the Four Corners around Mesa Verde; and the Savannah River valley. The Europeans returned after 1492 and converted many more buildings into ruins: the Spaniards so desolated pueblos that they were not reoccupied; the British burnt out the towns of the Appalachee for harboring Catholic priests; and the American armies of Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton destroyed the council houses, residences, orchards, and cornfields of the Iroquois, who some ninety years earlier had scorched the earth of their great town of Ganondagan, with its 150 longhouses up to 200 feet in length and 50 feet wide, before its 4,500 inhabitants evacuated before a French assault. British and American generals did nearly as much damage to the villages of the Cherokee in the colonial period.

The buildings thus destroyed were dimensioned to accommodate the tallest people in the world, half a foot to a foot taller than contemporary Europeans. Osage and Cheyenne males were observed by George Catlin (1796–1872) to average well over six feet; some of the Texas tribes were nearly two feet taller than the Spaniards who measured them. The council

house of the Appalachee at San Luis, Florida, was 132 feet in diameter. The Spanish friars reported that it could hold from two to three thousand people. These were large buildings for large people, well nourished over generations. Most of the people were agricultural, requiring storage buildings—the people of San Luis required two tons of maize to provide their seed corn. These were villagers, not isolated farmers like many who succeeded them. The Cherokees lived in Upper Towns and Lower Towns, and so did the Creeks. They and their linguistic cousins the Iroquois were sedentary, agricultural townspeople, which is why Sullivan and Clinton could so easily burn them out. The Ancestral Pueblo People and the canal-building hydrologists of Arizona were more urban, per capita, than the Europeans outside Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The first practitioners of new urbanism—the concentration of residential structures in multilevel, multifamily complexes—were pueblo people.

impermanent buildings

The Mississipians and the Hopewell people in Ohio used earth to create platforms, one of which, Monk's Mound at Cahokia, has a larger footprint than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Most of the towns of early people in the desert West were composed of earthen structures, pounded and dried earth, a substitute for stone. The red brick of Williamsburg, so derided by Jefferson as barbaric, is generically close to adobe but less susceptible to erosion. The American Indians did not expect anything they built to last very long; that was not its purpose. Those who build of earth expect it to return in fragments and particles to earth with the rain. They expect to slather it back again as a renewable resource. Even Chacoan architecture of finely crafted layers of stone was intended to be plastered, and thus to be continuously renewed. It is not wise to attribute to its builders the expectation that their buildings would be inhabited much longer than they were—about two hundred years. Europeans who come to Chaco, New Mexico, are prone to follow the example of Jefferson's friend, le Compte de Volney, and ruminate upon ruins, as if the Chacoans aspired to Egyptian longevity and had been deprived of it. But did they?

Like their predecessors and successors, like the builders of the council house at San Luis and the slab carpenters of the Northwest Coast, the Chacoans were building for use. They were as aware of flux as the defining quality of life as were Ionian Greek philosophers designated as pre-Socratic. They saw their world as being fluid as quicksand and as unpredictable as fire. So Pythagoreans and Chacoans turned to the heavens for predictability and continuity, as it appears the Hopewell of Ohio did, and the people of Poverty Point in Louisiana. For these builders, eternity was out there, not here, in architecture. Archaeologists state that the average occupancy of southwestern masonry and adobe architecture was less than two hundred years. But their configurations deferred to patterns lasting hundreds of thousands of years in a larger universe. The earthen octagons, squares, and circles of the Hopewell, the axes of the D-shaped and E-shaped assemblages of rooms in the Chacoan world, the orientation of "effigies"—quite possibly configured according to stellar constellation patterns—in Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and Chihuahua, and (possibly) of the villages of the Cherokee and the Iroquois, attend to a world larger and more stable than their own.

Many American Indian buildings were impermanent for more immediate reasons. The people had learned from nasty experience in large urban centers such as Cahokia–St. Louis that human excrement accumulates, and that in cold climates a few thousand people can quickly consume all the wood in the neighborhood for construction, heating, and cooking. They expected to move. It was practical to do so. Therefore, a slab house in Washington State, the apotheosis of a brush arbor in San Luis holding three thousand people, or a Cherokee council house was conceived, like a Japanese wooden temple, to be periodically rebuilt in place so long as the place was healthy and still easily supplied with firewood and its people fed from productive fields. There is nothing artificial about the reconstructions found in many parks and traditional villages. They are today, much as they were in the early American Republic, born to serve life, and then to be replaced. Even the great earthworks that awed the founders were impermanent and were regularly restored with fresh mantles of earth (often in new colors) in sustained interaction with the Earth, while the configurations of the mounds remained in interaction with the heavens.