The smallest examples of
paneled doors are those employed for closing the small, square openings
in the back walls of house rows, which still retain the defensive
arrangement so marked in many of the ancient pueblos. In some instances
doors occur in the second stories of unterraced walls, their sills being
5 or 6 feet above the ground. In such cases the doors are reached by
ladders whose upper ends rest upon the sills. Elevated openings of this
kind are closed in the usual manner with a rude, single-paneled door,
which is often whitened with a coating of clayey gypsum.
Carefully worked paneled doors are much more common in Zu?i than in
Tusayan, and within the latter province the villages of the first mesa
make more extended use of this type of door, as they have come into more
intimate contact with their eastern brethren than other villages of the
group. Fig. 77 illustrates a portion of a Hano house in which two wooden
doors occur. These specimens indicate the rudeness of Tusayan
workmanship. It will be seen that the workman who framed the upper one
of these doors met with considerable difficulty in properly joining the
two boards of the panel and in connecting these with the frame. The
figure shows that at several points the door has been reenforced and
strengthened by buckskin and rawhide thongs. The same device has been
employed in the lower door, both in fastening together the two pieces of
the panel and in attaching the latter to the framing.
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