Adobe buildings in Native American Culture

A mixture of clay and water called adobe was one of the primary building materials used by American Indians of pre-Inca Peru, Mesoamerica, and the North American Southwest of what is now the United States. Applied wet as plaster or mortar, or mixed with plant fiber and dried into bricks, adobe enabled builders to construct vast APARTMENT COMPLEXES, referred to as pueblos by the Spaniards, throughout these regions.
The Moche, who lived on the northwest coast of what is now Peru from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, built enormous temples using adobe bricks. One of the most impressive examples of Moche adobe construction is the larger of two pyramids built at Moche near the modern city of Trujillo. The largest of these pyramids, the Huaca del Sol, consists of about 130 million bricks. These bricks are inscribed with what archaeologists believe are the names of individual workers or teams of workers. Archaeologists have found a number of smaller adobe pyramids as well as adobe forts scattered throughout what is now Peru. Often these structures were decorated with clay relief and painted with murals. The Hohokam, whose culture arose in what is now Arizona in about 300 B.C. and who are the ancestors of the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Tohono O’odham (Papago), built massive mud-walled structures that Spanish conquistadores compared to castles. One of the foremost examples of Hohokam architecture, Casa Grande, is located outside of what is now Phoenix, Arizona. Thought to have been built about A.D. 1300, Casa Grande is four stories tall, and at least 1,500 cubic yards of soil was used in its construction. It has adobe walls that are more than four feet thick at their base, tapering to about two feet at the top, with no reinforcing beams. Casa Grande’s ceilings were framed with more than 600 juniper, pine, and fir beams cut from mountains more than 50 miles away. The Hohokam often used I-beam construction for such framing. Archaeologists do not know the exact purpose of Casa Grande and other huge Hohokam buildings but believe that they were designed to protect against attack. Window openings in upper levels of Casa Grande are aligned to the position of the sun at the time of equinox and at solstices, so they might have served as OBSERVATORIES as well.
Initially archaeologists speculated that Casa Grande’s thick walls were built in stages, with mud packed into wattle and daub forms made from woven branches plastered with mud, and then compacted by applying pressure. However, recent study has shown that Hohokam builders mixed mud to the proper consistency in large holes they dug in the ground, then piled it up, or “puddled” it, by hand in 26-inch courses. Each layer was allowed to dry before the next one was laid. The process was repeated layer by layer. After nearly 700 years, the walls of Casa Grande are weathered, but they still stand. Their durability can be credited to the fact that the original ARCHITECTS selected caliche for the adobe. Caliche is a soil layer in which earth particles have been bonded by carbonates of calcium or magnesium, which cause the adobe to harden, almost like cement, as it dries.
In addition to the Hohokam, the Anasazi—who lived in the Southwest of what is now the United States from 350 B.C. to about A.D. 1450, and who are the forerunners of modern Pueblo people—relied on adobe for the construction of their homes. In about A.D. 700 they traded the pit houses that they had previously occupied for above-ground cubicle homes, built so that adjoining units shared walls. As their population grew, the Anasazi added stories to their dwellings. Families slept in the upper front units, where they would be warmed at night by a form of passive solar heating provided by the adobe. Heat absorbed from the sun by the adobe walls throughout the day radiated into the rooms at night. Food was stored in the cooler interior rooms.
The most skilled Anasazi adobe builders lived in the pueblos of Chaco Canyon in what is now New Mexico. According to the National Park Service, the agency in charge of the site, buildings in the Chaco community were originally constructed in A.D. 700 from a central design that was added onto later. That, combined with the construction techniques used to build the structures, has led archaeologists to believe that the Anasazi had architects whose job it was to plan the structures before they were built.
In Pueblo Bonito, the main complex in Chaco Canyon, an average room required about 50,000 tons of stone and 16,500 tons of clay for its construction. The adobe walls were built on top of mortar- and rubble-filled trenches in order to keep the walls from settling. The walls themselves, which tapered from three feet at the base to one foot at the top, were made of rough, flat stones mortared with adobe. This core was covered with flat pieces of rock called ashlar. A layer of adobe was plastered over this. When the building was expanded, Anasazi builders bonded new walls to old ones by interlocking the new stones with those in the existing walls. Some of the walls in the Chaco complex had a rubble and adobe core and were faced with stone.
The Anasazi builders who lived in areas along the Rio Grande River often could not find enough suitable rock for construction of their homes. There was, however, an abundance of water. Instead of using adobe as plaster over a rock core, they made fat adobe bricks called “turtle backs,” slapping and shaping them, then setting them atop each other and smoothing over the surface with a finish coat of adobe. Often historians mistakenly credit the Spaniards with teaching the Pueblo people how to make uniform adobe bricks that are molded in forms. (The Spanish learned adobe construction from the Moors, who migrated from Africa to Spain in A.D. 711.) Two archaeological sites that have been dated to about A.D. 1300 show evidence that precontact American Indians poured wet mud into stone or wooden forms and allowed it to sun-dry. These sites are the pre-Hopi site of Homol’ovi and the Fourmile Ruin near Taylor, Arizona. The most famous of the adobe pueblos still occupied today is Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, which was started before the 1500s. The walls of the two clusters of units that make up this pueblo are two feet thick at the bottom tapering to about a foot thick at the top. Each spring the pueblo’s residents replaster the exterior walls of their homes with a new coat of adobe. Adobe is also used as a roofing material at Taos and in other pueblos. Cedar beams, whose ends protrude through the walls, support the roofs. Branches are placed on these log beams, or vigas, and are next covered with grass. A layer of adobe plaster serves as a sealant.
Today adobe architecture has come to be known as one component of the Santa Fe style and is popular throughout the Southwest. However, modern builders, who must meet mandated building codes, find it more expensive to build with adobe than to construct frame houses and plaster the exteriors with adobe to make them look authentic.

The use of acoustics in native Americans culture

The science of sound is known as acoustics. Precursors of the Inca were well versed in acoustics, as demonstrated by their production of POTTERY silvatos (whistles). (The Inca established an empire in what is now Peru in about A.D. 1000.)
These silvatos were shaped like small human figurines and were hollow with holes in front and in the back. A hole in the top of the head served as the blowhole for the whistle. These whistles were similar in tone and sound to ocarinas.
Unlike an ocarina, each silvato produced a distinct harmonic sound that was rich in tone. Upon examining a broken silvato, archaeologists found the source of the harmonic tone. Inside were two spherically configured, partially enclosed resonance compartments, each connected to a sound hole. When the whistle was blown, the air exiting the sound holes stimulated vibrations from the resonance compartments. This overall effect produced a fuller tone than that of whistles without this ingenious feature. Pino Turolla, author of Beyond the Andes: My Search for the Origins of Pre-Inca Civilization, stated about the silvatos, “What incredible technical mastery these people had; their expertise embraced even acoustics.”

The Use of Achiote (annatto, bixin, Bixa orellana) by native americans

The achiote Bixa orellana is a shrub that is indigenous to the tropics of America. Its seed covering, when ground, was used by the ancient Aztec to flavor CHOCOLATE drinks and to dye clothing. The Aztec civilization arose in Mesoamerica about A.D. 1100. Bixin, the bright red, oily DYE contained in the husks, was used as body paint by Indians in South America’s Amazon Basin and served double duty as an INSECT REPELLENT. It was used to color pottery as well. The dye, also known as annatto, is employed today as food coloring, primarily for butter, margarine and cheeses, and as a seasoning.

American Indian influence on abstract art

(ca. 1930–present) North American, Mesoamerican, South American Andean cultures
Abstract art consists of works that are not subject to the limits imposed by representation. The emphasis in abstract art is on form rather than subject matter. Some abstract designs have no recognizable subject matter. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, pre-Columbian and post-Columbian abstract art that is indigenous to the Americas served as inspiration for the modern American abstract art movement. This reversed the stance of early ethnographers who had termed American Indian art primitive, often because the works were executed on buildings, pottery vessels, clothing, and textiles, rather than on canvas or in marble as was done in the European tradition.
Modern ethnologists and art historians, reflecting on the major artistic contributions of American Indians from the Arctic Circle to South America, now view these indigenous abstractions as both powerful and sophisticated. The split depiction of animals made by artisans of the Tsimshian tribe living on the coast of what is now British Columbia is one example frequently cited. These works were collected and written about by anthropologist Franz Boas. Another example is the progressively abstracted depiction of birds and animals in Mesoamerican glylphic writing and patterned textiles produced by the Aztec, whose civilization arose in Mesoamerica about A.D. 1100. The Maya, who also
lived in Mesoamerica starting in about 1500 B.C., produced abstract textile designs, as did the Inca Empire that was established in what is now Peru in about A.D. 1000. The mounds built by the Adena and Hopewell cultures that occupied the Mississippi River Valley of what is now the United States from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 200 and 300 B.C. to A.D. 1250, respectively, are huge abstractions. The Nazca Lines, huge designs made in the earth of the Ingenio Valley in what is now Peru, are also examples of abstraction on an enormous scale. The Nazca culture flourished starting about 600 B.C.
For American Indian artists, as for modern abstract artists, even the simplest designs, such as stripes or a series of triangles, had meaning. Their designs are what modern art critics call “visual syntax”—literally, a language of design. “The fundamental unity of the metaphors that inform the arts of all these non-Western cultures—The ‘archaic,’ as well as the ‘tribal’—essentially manifests itself in the shaping of symbols, monuments, ritual paraphernalia, and semantic signs that were widely absorbed by the societies,” writes art theorist Cesar Paternosto in The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art.
Non-Indian artists first turned their attention to these works by Indians in the early 1930s. Art historian and abstract painter Barnett Newman believed so much in the power of these abstract metaphors that by 1945, in an article he wrote comparing two artists who were painting in Paris, he said, “They have roots deep in the tradition of our American aborigines” and added that “only by this kind of contribution is there any hope for the possible development of a truly American art.” Adolph Gottlieb, who painted a series of pictographs based on artistic concepts that he learned from textiles and paintings made by indigenous people living along the Pacific Northwest Coast, cosigned a letter to the New York Times in 1943. Along with Newman and fellow artist Mark Rothko, he publicly claimed “spiritual kinship with primitives and archaic art.” In 1946 Newman organized an exhibit of paintings by Indians of the Northwest at a prestigious art gallery. Many of these paintings had come from the American Museum of Natural History. Newman said that the move had declassified the pieces as scientific specimens and reclassified them as art.
Sculptor John Storrs, who made towerlike structures of stone and metal, based his designs on some of the patterns of the Navajo (Dineh) rugs that he collected. Sculptors Henry Moore and Josef Albers incorporated indigenous Mesoamerican designs into their works. Painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who lived in New York City in the 1940s, wrote that he had an inner vibration comparable to American Indian art and acknowledged that prehistoric American cave painting and rock art had inspired his own works. Painter Jackson Pollock, who grew up in the West, was knowledgeable about American Indian art and borrowed themes from indigenous artifacts during the early part of his career.

Abacus in Native American Culture

(A.D. 900–1000) Mesoamerican cultures
An abacus is a portable calculating device using a frame with rods that are strung with beads. Aztec and Maya who lived in Mesoamerica performed mathematical calculations using an abacus made from maize kernels, instead of beads, threaded on strings. It provided a faster and more accurate way of adding and subtracting than relying on memory alone. This abacus, which was called a nepohualtzitzin, had three beads on the top deck and four beads on the bottom. Archaeologists have dated the presence of such counters at about A.D. 900 to 1000. The Aztec abacus, which was devised without any knowledge of the Chinese abacus (invented about 500 B.C.) required the same level of critical thinking and knowledge of mathematics to develop.
The Inca, whose empire was established in what is now Peru in about A.D. 1000, were also known to have a type of abacus. This consisted of a tray with compartments that were arranged in rows in which counters were moved in order to make calculations.