Rebuilding a Sinagua Pithouse - Part 01
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Welcome to page one of a series of pages, created extemporaneously in journal fashion as I work to solve a nine hundred year old riddle, based upon Thomas' observations and recording of a real place where people once lived. Simultaneously, I will be learning the basics of 3D software. This should serve many purposes, both digital and archaeological, all educational and perhaps entertaining.
I am not an archaeologist. A lot of what I will produce here will be second guessing based on many drawings and photos I've collected and some interviews with national park employees and professionals.
Identifying an ancient ruin site is a trick in itself. To most people it all looks like some unusual ground formation and piles of rocks. If it weren't for the ceramic artifacts laying around nothing would reveal its true history. Real people actually inhabited this spot! Above is a photo of a portion of a thirty foot diameter depression that is a nearly perfect circle with a uniformly eroded slope and a depth of about five feet. Fallen pinon pine trees cover half of it today.
This was once a large occupied room, semi subterranean, we now call a pithouse. It is the focus of this presentation. Below are the stones that once were the walls of an adjacent, square, above ground pueblo; a single room with an opening in the roof with the traditional ladder we see in kiva photographs.
Elsewhere around the site is rubble from illegal wood cutters and trash from other visitors. All of the vegetation is recent, we have no idea what was growing here when they occupied this location.
In your mind's eye you must be able to identify the eroded geometry as it is today, the remains of 900 or more years ago. Essentially what we have here is a cone shaped pit and the depression and stones of an adjoining room. Both were built into the ground with unique architecture that covered them. We will attempt, here, to rebuild that construction for each unit.
Here are a few snapshots of the kind of ceramic pottery shards found at this site.
I've decided to execute this in a "teaching" simplified geometry form for clarity, and so it will not overtax my abilities. My construction herein will depict geometry in basic shapes rather than realistic form. It will be clearer for you to see what is happening and it will not overload my computer with textures and detail unnecessary. I also don't want it to take six months to finish.
So, within the 3D software program, Carrara, I've built a "block" of earth into which I will excavate my floor shapes for each building. Then, step by step I'll add what I perceive was done based upon my research.
As indicated earlier what we have here are two semi subterranean excavations, in their original uneroded state. The circular pithouse starts with a round pit with a ledge inset around the circumference. This ledge will be a place to "seat" the heavy rafters. It will become clearer as we proceed. The square subterrainean floor of the pueblo structure is indicated but will be dealt with later. This depiction is somewhat to scale and in proportion to match the actual archaeological site. This occupation is on a hilltop in a north south alignment, which is typical.
Comment: Consider the labor involved in digging this pit, all by hand with homemade tools perhaps no more refined than digging sticks and baskets for dirt removal. The workers were skilled enough to dig a level floor with straight vertical walls.
One of the first things to do was to build a retaining wall around the entire circumference to ensure that the dirt walls did not cave in. In my research I read that these walls weren't always as perfect as my rendering, often being constructed of stone instead of wood. Placing wooden supports against the dirt would make them decay sooner and invite insects, mold, etc. But it was done. I've read that a pithouse would last between 15 and 20 years. As many sites show evidence of occupation much longer than that repairs must have been done as needed.
Here's a photo from Thomas' journal showing an internal stone wall as described above. Some of these interiors were quite refined. In the upper right corner of this photo you can see the remains of some original wall plaster. Of course, the wooden log solution is perishable and today nothing is left.
Here I've installed the first of four center vertical roof supports. These are substantial pieces cut from ponderosa trees as a rule, as they hold up the entire building structure.
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