they seem to have one suggestive difference, the absence of the vaulted ceiling and the consequent increased size of rooms. The rooms were probably flat and supported by beams resting upon internal pillars where necessary (Fig. 53). It seems strange that the Maya did not make more use of wood, but the Nahua style reminds us of Pueblo architecture, where beams of wood support the ceilings and roofs.[1] Thus again, we have an interesting case of continuous distribution. It is certain that the large and imposing ruins did not house the bulk of the population. The surviving examples show that the prevailing habitation was a small, rectangular one-room house whose essential structure, when of stone or adobe, was the same as found in the several units of the so-called palaces and temples, except that the roof was thatched. In Peru, the roofs were often supported by ridge poles which would give us about the same interior effect as the stepped ceilings. The walls of the houses take three forms, all of which may be encountered on either continent; namely, stone, adobe and mud reinforced with canes or wattling. Studies among the Pueblos of New Mexico have indicated that when we know more of that area we shall find a period of single detached adobe and stone rectangular houses preceding the composite pile of the modern pueblo. In fact, the Pueblo Indians of the present show a disposition to revert to the detached house, which does not materially differ from a single unit in the village structure. In like manner, we find in Peru a grouping of single houses around a court so as to form a complete enclosure, and the groundplan of these is not essentially different from those of the preceding structures. Similar conditions have been reported for the Maya district.
We see, then, that in at least two particulars we have a broad cultural base for the highly specialized building arts of the Maya and Inca. That all these widely distributed characters result by diffusion from these two centers is scarcely logical, for even cultures are not built of nothing, but all have a long train of historical antecedents. It is much more reasonable to assume that diffusion, and perhaps other factors, brought a certain extended uniformity in house-building
- ↑ Holmes, 1895−1897. I.
