Types of prehistoric Southwestern architecture — Inside the Classic

From Tower to Kiva: A Morphological Argument

Fewkes devotes considerable attention to the "problematical" round towers found in both the Old and New Worlds. He notes that their function has been "a bone of contention among archeologists," but he advances a specific theory: the tower is the earliest form of Pueblo sacred architecture, identical in form to the later kiva. The argument hinges on continuity—"the form of the tower is identical with that of the sacred room or kiva, and it has survived to the present time as a special chamber for worship." From this premise, Fewkes reconstructs a developmental sequence: the union of secular and sacred rooms produced cliff-dwellings (towers inside caves) and open-air pueblos (dwellings clustered around a tower base). The tower, he claims, "passed without morphological changes into the kiva." This evolutionary model is applied to sites in "the canyons and plateaus of southwestern Colorado."

Social Units in Stone: Kivas as Clan Markers

Fewkes treats the number and size of kivas as direct indices of social organization. "Sociological advance goes hand in hand with architectural complication," he writes. In the early stage, the number of social units equals the number of kivas. As clans consolidated, sacred rooms diminished in relative number but increased in size. The excavated Far View House in Mesa Verde National Park provides a key example: its population was likely as large as that of Cliff Palace, yet it contains only four kivas, one of which is "four times as large as any in Cliff Palace." Fewkes interprets the central, oversized kiva as the oldest, first settled, and subsequently dominant. The text thus reads architectural change as a record of political and ritual centralization, with the kiva functioning as a built expression of clan identity and priestly fraternity.

A Classification of Southwestern Building Types

Toward the end of the excerpted portion, Fewkes announces a shift to classification: "Following the lines of social evolution and architectural types considered in the preceding pages, we come now to a classification of buildings in the Southwest." He distinguishes between early semi-nomadic structures ("a hut or dugout") and "durable houses built of clay or stone." Even in small buildings, he identifies two room types—circular and rectangular—though the classification is not fully elaborated in the available text. The author's method is comparative: he draws parallels with Peruvian chulpas and Old World towers, but insists that New World evidence—specifically the survival of the kiva form—allows a more secure interpretation. The classification appears intended to organize the diversity of Pueblo ruins into a coherent evolutionary framework, linking form to function and social stage.

Fewkes's monograph is a tightly argued essay that treats architecture as a proxy for social and religious evolution. Readers should attend to his comparative method—especially the use of ethnographic analogy from living Pueblo peoples—and to the way he builds a developmental sequence from a single morphological premise. The text rewards careful attention to its logical structure, as Fewkes moves from calendar to tower to kiva to clan to village, each step grounded in observable architectural features. The incomplete classification section hints at a larger project left unfinished.

That afternoon, the rain drummed the window while Fewkes’s measurements of kiva walls sank in, how circular origins became squared villages. The quiet precision of his field notes, his patience with ruins, stayed with me. Later, I drifted through a drawer of old photographs and found myself looking up In Bohemia with Du Maurier: The First of a Series of Reminiscences — Context and Discussion, another kind of remembrance, equally unhurried.