Doors are often converted into windows, and windows are
reduced in size or enlarged, or new ones are broken through the walls,
apparently, with the greatest freedom, so that they do not, from their
finish or method of construction, furnish any clue to the antiquity of
the mud-covered wall in which they are found. Occasionally surface
weathering of the walls, particularly in Zu?i, exposes a bit of
horizontal pole embedded in the masonry, the lintel of a window long
since sealed up and obliterated by successive coats of mud finish. It is
probable that many openings are so covered up as to leave no trace of
their existence on the external wall. In Zu?i particularly, where the
original arrangement for entering and lighting many of the rooms must
have been wholly lost in the dense clustering of later times, such
changes are very numerous. It often happens that the addition of a new
room will shut off one or more old windows, and in such cases the latter
are often converted into interior niches which serve as open cupboards.
Such niches were sometimes of considerable size in the older pueblos.
Changes in the character of openings are quite common in all of the
pueblos. Usually the evidences of such changes are much clearer in the
rougher and more exposed work of Tusayan than in the adobe-finished
houses of Zu?i. Pl. CVII illustrates a large, balcony-like opening in
Oraibi that has been reduced to the size of an ordinary door by filling
in with rough masonry.
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