sts of approxi
mately eighteen villages
, all relatively accessible from Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The especially important _villages of the Zuni lie more to the southwest and can be reached in a day's journey from Fort Wingate. The hardest to reach-and therefore the most undisturbed in the p
reservation of ancient ways are the villages of the Moki (Hopi), six in all, rising out of three parallel ridges of rock. In the midst, in the plains, lies the Mexican settlement of Santa Fe, now the capital of New Mexico, having come under the dominion of the United States after a hard struggle, which lasted into the last century. From here, and from the neighboring town of Albuquerque, one can reach the majority of the eastern Pueblo villages without great difficulty. Near Albuquerque is the village of Laguna, which, though it does not lie quite so high as the others, provides a very good example of a Pueblo settlement. The actual village lies on the far side of the Atchison-Topeka-Santa Fe railway line. The European settlement, below in the plain, abuts on the station. The indigenous village consists of two-storied houses. The entrance is from the top: one climbs up a ladder, as there is no door at the bottom. The original reason for this
type of house was its superior defensibility against enemy attack. In this way the Pueblo Indians developed a cross between a house and a fortification which is characteristic of their civilization and probably reminiscent of prehistoric American times. It is a terraced structure of houses whose ground floors sit on second houses which can sit on yet third ones and thus form a conglomeration of rectangular living quarters. In the interior of such a house, small dolls are suspended from the ceiling-not mere toy dolls but rather like the figures of saints that hang in Catholic farmhouses (Figure 2). They are the so-called kachina dolls: faithful representations of the masked dancers, the demoniac mediators between man and nature at the periodic festivals that accompany the annual harvest cycle and who constitute some of the most remarkable and unique expressions of this farmers' and hunters' religion. On the wall, in contradistinction to these dolls, hangs the symbol of intruding American culture: the broom. But the mo
st essential product of the applied arts, with both practical and religious purposes, is the earthenware pot, in which water is carried in all its urgency and scarcity. The characteristic style for the drawings on these pots is a skeletal heraldic image. A bird, for example, may be dissected into its essential component parts to form a heraldic abstraction. It becomes a hieroglyph, not simply t
o be looked at but, rather, to be read (Figure 3). We have here an intermediary stage between a naturalistic image and a sign, between a realistic mirror image and writing. From the o
