The Dakota Conflict Trials

 


How the Native Americans of the Southeastern United States Lived with Nature

By Richard L.Thornton, Creek Indian Architect & City Planner

 

There are detailed descriptions of individual buildings put up by the societies first contacted by Spanish explorers in the early and mid-1500s, plus those of French and English explorers in the late 1500s and early 1600s.  It has generally been assumed that construction techniques during this Late Hierarchal Period had not changed radically from the Early and Mature Hierarchal Periods; but in truth, that is not really known for sure.   There are too many under-investigated archaeological sites in the Southeast   The Late Hierarchal cultures were similar to their predecessors, but put less energy into public architecture and art.

Even less is known about Woodland, Sedentary and Archaic structures.  Posthole patterns formed by the decomposed humus of decayed wood suggest certain floor plan arrangements.  However, as to the three dimensional shape of these structures,  archaeologists are left to speculate based on the appearance of contemporary houses of primitive societies.  Also, when one is talking about organic structures dating thousands of years ago,  Mother Earth has had much more time to disperse and conceal the remnants.

Early European explorers consistently described Southeastern buildings as being formed of natural, organic materials that have usually decomposed by now.  The materials came from the earth and its vegetation - and in time they returned to Mother Earth.   The walls seen by these explorers were formed by vertical posts interwoven with horizontal saplings. The posts were usually set in trenches, back-filled with dense clay to form a buttress and thermal barrier.   Larger buildings had interior posts to support the roof frame and interior partitions.   The columns, beams and purlins were either notched or else bound by twine.  It is very possible that they sometimes were pegged.  A mixture of clay and thatch was packed into the interstices of the wooden wall.  This core wall was then plastered with sandy clay, varying in color from red to salmon to gray to white.   In the Altamaha River Basin and Coastal areas of Georgia, buildings were finished with stucco composed of white clay and crude lime.  The lime was made by burning shells. Fragments of unburned shells added strength to the stucco.

Roofs were framed with timber rafters notched & lashed together with vegetative twine and then reinforced with narrower horizontal purlins.  Spaces between girders were filled with saplings.   Roofing was probably either thatch, slit river cane, bark shingles lashed to the girders and purlins, or in Florida, long palm fronds.  The underside of the thatch was often stuccoed with clay.  It is also possible that some buildings were sheaved in animal hides.   Interior partitions were either wattle & daub composition like the exterior walls or woven cane similar in appearance to interior partitions of traditional Japanese houses.   Some functional buildings such as storage buildings and granaries did not have wattle & daub walls, but instead had either parallel sapling or woven cane walls to allow for ventilation.

Again it should be emphasized that merely because Southeastern cultures built a certain way in 1540 or 1690, does not mean that all buildings were constructed during earlier periods using the same construction techniques.  There is not any direct evidence from the  archaeological investigations carried out at most  sites to suggest alternative techniques,  but just because alternative methods have not been discovered does not mean that they did not exist.   The majority of Native American settlement sites in the Southeast have never been excavated or analyzed with ground radar.  Who knows what secrets lurk under the ground?

Although fieldstones are plentiful in many areas of the Southeastern Piedmont and Highlands, very few stone masonry structures like those constructed by the Anasazi in the Southwestern United States or by most of the advanced cultures in Mexico, Central America and South America have not been identified in the Southeast. There has never been any irrefutable explanation for the scarcity of stone structures.   Stone walls and enclosures were built during the Early and Middle Sedentary period, but even this tradition did not continue to any great extent.  Stone retaining walls have been recently discovered around the retaining walls of the plazas at Etowah. Several sites such as Cahokia, definitely had some flagstone paved terraces.   One possible explanation is that the Hierarchal Culture architecture evolved in semi-tropical regions where there were few stones, and most upland towns were located in alluvial plains where stones were sparse.

 

The author has written six books on Native American architecture, town planning and culture. He is also an expert on the architecture of the ancient indigenous cultures of Mexico and Central America. In the past, he has taught that subject at the university level.