More than constraints of climate or technology dictated the size and slope of American Indian homes, camps, and towns. Indian architectural traditions also reflected the diversity of tribal economic patterns, social organizations, historical experiences, religious systems, and worldviews. American Indian societies were no slaves to necessity, and in any particular region any one of a number of determinants could have the greatest impact.
———In the Northeast, for instance, neither natural limitations of building materials nor climate forced Iroquois tribespeople to build bark-covered, barrel-roofed longhouses up to four hundred feet long. Length was determined by the social code, which required all members of the same (matrilineal) clan to live under one roof. SImilarly, on the opposite coast, the Salish-speaking people of the Puget Sound chose to construct equally lengthy, shed-roofed structures of cedar planks to shelter, in some cases, entire villages within a single structure. On the other hand, their northern neighbors along the British Columbia coast preferred separate wood structures so that more prestigious lineages might be immediately recognized by their "noble" houses, which often carried their own proper names.
———To the general public the subject of Indian architecture conjures up the stereotypical trio of igloo, tipi, and wigwam. Across North America, however, Indian builders created dozens of different structures for multiple purposes using the bark, wood, rocks, reeds, grass, earth, snow, and other natural materials at hand.
———Up and down the Atlantic Coast one basic structural system — pole frames sheathed with bark or reeds — produced a wide spectrum of building types. In the Canadian Maritimes and the eastern subarctic, tipi-shaped wigwams were made of conical groupings of fir uprights rigidified with supporting hoops. For their covering, birch-bark sheets were sewn into long scrolls with root fibers and stiffened at the end with battens. Once the sheets were draped over the frame, external poles kept them from blowing off in heavy winds. Inside these cozy shelters the floors were softened with interwoven sweet-smelling spruce boughs; furs provided added warmth and comfort.
———For more permanent settlements along the Mid-Atlantic Coast, Algonquian-speaking tribes bent their saplings into rounded shapes, which were then shrouded with various barks. Known by the generic Algonquian term for "dwelling," the one- or two-family wigwam was hemispherical. But the frame could also be elongated, creating an aisle of hoops for a barrel-roofed "longhouse" that could shelter numerous families. John White's sketches of the North Carolina native settlements he visited in 1585 show villages with and without protective log palisades, longhouses of different sizes (probably reflecting social status), a pointy-roofed "temple" structure, clearly delineated dance and ritual grounds, central "streets," and lookout stands on stilts for deterring crows from corn fields.
———Along the St. Lawrence River were found the most elaborate bark buildings — Iroquois longhouses. Celebrated in native myth and oratory as well as in social and political history, these structures at one time extended hundreds of feet in length, depending on the population of the resident clan. Their roofing frames of bent (or perhaps prebent) saplings were lashed atop vertical upright posts. Roofed with elm-bark slabs, a clan totem emblazoned by the doorway, such a structure could be expanded when a new husband married into the building's social unit. Within the building, bunklike compartments lined both sides, with families sharing cooking fires that were spaced down the central corridor and from whose pots any house resident was free to partake. Occupied year-round, in the seventeenth century some larger Iroquois villages contained dozens of such structures.
———In the Great Lakes and across the subarctic, bark technology produced a host of structures. Among the Winnebagos and Ojibwas, oral traditions perpetuated the making of over half a dozen building types. There were small domical wigwams, roofed with birch bark but often walled with reed mats for easy rain runoff. To clamp the bark roofing in place, heavy poles were leaned around the building, or an exoskeleton of saplings was bound tightly over it. Decorated woven mats were hung inside for insulation. For their great medicine-lodge ceremonies, extended domical structures were constructed, with the framing left open, the side walls of leafy boughs or bark, and the interior appointed to meet ritual requirements. But for divination rituals they also constructed telephone-booth-sized structures, popularly known as "shaking tents," in which shamans hid themselves to divine the whereabouts of lost objects or desired game.
———Winter buildings also included not only small conical wigwams but extended conical or tentlike structures inhabited by a handful of families. In extremely cold weather their outside, slanting walls might be banked with snow and the interior would be floored with springy evergreens. For summer usage families often moved into arier, gable-roofed houses, cooking outside beneath attached arbors whose roofs could also serve as drying racks for firewood or vegetables.
———In the Far North a time-honored mode of fighting extreme cold was to burrow into the ground. Semisubterranean houses framed with whale ribs or stacked vertebrae, corbeled driftwood or flat rocks and covered with turf or sod are found in encampments built by most circumpolar peoples. Their drooped floors allowed for maximum natural insulation, their ramplike entry tunnels often featured cold traps, their thick walls and roofs — with thermal effectiveness usually enhanced by a padding of thick snow — contained the meager heat provided by oil lamps and human bodies, and their raised interior sleeping and working decks kept occupants off the cold floor and as close as possible to trapped, rising heat.
———The elaboration of a snow igloo (from Canadian Inuit iglu,"house"), a catenary arch composed of a spiraling of snow blocks preferably cut from a fresh drift, was in fact limited to the central Canadian Inuit peoples. With an ice window cut from a frozen stream placed over the entryway tunnel, walrus hides toggled inside for additional insulation, and furs thickly spread on sleeping areas, these structures kept occupants comfortable during the harshest season. When a number of igloos were linked by windproof tunnels, a central, domical roof might be constructed for communal games and feasts. Up to thirty feet in diameter, such roofs were strong enough to support trapezes on which shamans might display their powers.
———At the opposite end of the climate range, across the southeastern portion of North America, tribes like the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws clustered around "towns," reflecting the region's pre-Columbian civic heritage of ceremonial centers containing plazas geometrically flanked by earthworks that supported temples of chiefly residences. Early Spanish and British chronicles verify that Hopewell and Mississippian archaeological traditions were reflected in the settlements of their historical-period successors. Domestic structures, build around a superstructure of hardwood posts and peak-roofed with a thatch covering, were walled with cane wattle and clay daub. Around the exterior might be applied a whitewash colored by finely ground oyster shells.
———Most southeastern towns also featured an open-air court for playing ball games and a ceremonial "square ground," flanked by arbors, with assigned seating for dignitaries and clan members. Most important was the winter "townhouse," called by the Creeks chakofa, with its steep conical roof that white visitors often likened to a sugar loaf. Used for ritual gatherings, tribal deliberations, and diplomatic negotiations, Cherokee council houses contained bleachers that could seat five hundred occupants and a centrally placed sacred fire fed by appointed tenders.
———On the Great Plains the early architectural traditions of rectangular earth lodges persisted into historic times, although the buildings gradually turned circular in form. Found within sedentary villages occupied by gardening-and-hunting tribes in both the central plains and the Middle Missouri, the structures featured partially excavated floors and were framed with cottonwood side posts, central pillars, and roofing rafters. A matting of grass or bark, earth or sod was heaped and smoothened over the buildings, which in this damp climate usually required refurbishment or replacement every dozen years.
———As the Pawnee peoples of Nebraska's Republican River and Loup River areas rounded their earth-lodge corners and added entryway tunnels of extended length, they ceremonially encoded the building members with cosmological symbolism. Key posts were associated with celestial deities, earth-lodge construction became a sacred ritual, and the buildings featured shrines at the western end opposite the main entrance and were used for astronomical observations through the centrally located smoke hole in the doorway.
———Along the upper Missouri River the Mandans and Hidatsas also shifted from rectangular to circular earth lodges shortly before white contact. Mandan villages were oriented around plazas in whose center sat at barrel-shaped shrine to Lone Man, the culture hero who had introduced most of their tribal institutions — including architecture. Under the direction of women who "owned" the rights to construction and control of work on buildings, men performed the heavy construction posts — unlike the Pawnees' buildings, which customarily used eight — and which might extend ninety feet in diameter.
———As horses increased mobility on the Great Plains, the tradition of conical tents whose semicircular covers could be packed onto triangular frames for easy transport gained heightened utility. Newly mounted tribes could now fully exploit the lengthy, lightweight lodge-pole pine for framing. Their portable buildings — generally known today as tipis, from the Lakota word meaning "to dwell" — soon trebled in height, allowing families to quickly erect and break them down on fast-moving buffalo hunts or to pitch them proudly in huge circles during religious festivals or at formal summertime gatherings when entire tribes convened.
———On their carefully tailored corners of sinew-sewn tanned, and smoked buffalo hides were often painted key symbols associated with the vision experience of a leading male occupant — even though these dwellings also fell under female dominion. The Kiowas of the southern plains and the Blackfeet far to the north were best known for these heraldic "murals in the round." Painted tipis were prominently displayed during annual Sun Dance gatherings, when clans or warrior societies pitched their tipis in time-honored locations around the central Sun Dance Lodge frame made of saplings radiating from a sacred forked cottonwood post.
———The most elaborate wood architecture in North America appeared along the northern Pacific Coast. Peoples such as the Kwakiutls, Tsimshians, and Haidas split huge red-cedar trunks using stone mauls and elk-horn wedges and then thinned the rough boards with "elbow adzes" edged with razor-sharp giant mussel shells — and later with metal obtained in exchange for sea-otter pelts. Around heavy post-and-beam frames, these wide boards were either slung vertically, shiplap fashion, with the help of supple withes, or else fixed horizontally around the front and sides. Shingling on the shallow gable roofs was of shorter split-cedar slabs. Inside the house were one or more rectangular tiers supporting the sleeping booths, while a fire pit burned in the earthen center of the building.
———Seaside villages were composed of a line or two of such houses facing the Pacific Coast fjords and inlets, with the most favorable locations found near river mouths. Among the Kwakiutls and Tsimshians, facades of elite buildings, generally positioned at the center of a string of houses, were elaborately painted with stylized renderings of clan ancestors. For the Haidas, the crest or "totem" pole associated with their distinctive six beam house generally carried these "autobiographies" of the houses and their mythic pedigrees, and facades were commonly unpainted.
———For the best example of the general priority of sociocultural determinants of the shape and look of American Indian-built forms, one might compare the southwestern Pueblo house cluster with the neighboring Navajo homelands. The older Pueblo Indian structures of New Mexico and Arizona saw greater use of adobe in the east, where the Rio Grande provided ample water, and more common employment of workable sandstone in the more arid, western mesa country of modern-day Arizona. Generally piling their three-to-five-story house clusters protectively around ceremonial plazas, the occupants used the roof terraces as work spaces for drying venison, vegetables, and firewood as well as for viewing platform from which to watch the communal harvest dances of summer and the winter annual dances. Completing the spiritual ensemble would be the man's sexual-religious meeting spaces, known generically by the Hopi word kiva. In form they were either circular free-standing structures, as one still sees today among the eastern Pueblos, entered by means of ladders jutting from the central smoke hole, or attached rectangular structures, as are still used at Arizona, Zuni, and the Hopi villages.
———When ancestors of the present-day Navajos and Apaches entered the region, however, they eschewed the Pueblo clustering idea in favor of dispersed family homesteads. Closely associated with Navajo identity is the centerpiece of these Indian ranches, the hogan, of which there are male and female types. Although Navajo builders have proved highly adaptive, constructing their hogans from cedar logs, rocks, railroad ties, cinder blocks, or two-by-fours, these structures share the basic requirements of being east-facing single-room homes with centrally placed cooking and heating sources.
———In addition to these buildings, Indians also improvised more temporary structures for many social and ceremonial occasions. Wherever coolness or shade was desired, arbors were often built from available materials. Throughout the diverse architectural inventory of California Indian peoples, such shades or ramadas were extremely common, along with earthen pit houses, conical thatch houses, and two-pitch redwood plank houses. These arbors could be rudimentary structures, such as those that northern Plains groups built of pole uprights and crosspieces with the flat roofing of leafy cottonwood boughs. Some were more elaborately constructed, such as Yokuts shades, which could provide a second roof over a row of smaller, grass-covered buildings.
———In other corners of Native America arbors were the preferred spaces for summer living, such as the shades built by Kiowas from bent hickory frames and thatched with willow boughs. When extra coolness was desired, the leaves would be dashed with buckets of water so that the subsequent evaporation would cause temperatures inside to drop on even the hottest days.

PETTER NABOKOV
University of Wisconsin at Madison