aboration of the use of adobe and its employment as a periodical
coating for the dwellings, probably developed gradually into the use of
a whitewash for the house walls, resulting finally in crude attempts at
wall decoration.

Many of the interiors in Zuni are washed with a coating of white, clayey
gypsum, used in the form of a solution made by dissolving in hot water
the lumps of the raw material, found in many localities. The mixture is
applied to the walls while hot, and is spread by means of a rude
glove-like sack, made of sheep or goat skin, with the hair side out.
With this primitive brush the Zuni housewives succeed in laying on a
smooth and uniform coating over the plaster. An example of this class of
work was observed in a room of house No. 2. It is difficult to determine
to what extent this idea is aboriginal; as now employed it has doubtless
been affected by the methods of the neighboring Spanish population,
among whom the practice of white-coating the adobe houses inside and out
is quite common. Several traces of whitewashing have been found among
the cliff-dwellings of Canyon de Chelly, notably at the ruin known as
Casa Blanca, but as some of these ruins contained evidences of
post-Spanish occupation, the occurrence there of the whitewash does not
necessarily imply any great antiquity for the practice.

External use of this material is much rarer, particularly in Zuni, where
only a few walls of upper stories are whitened. Where it is not
protected from the rains by an overhanging coping or other feature, the
finish is not durable. Occasionally where a doorway or other opening has
been repaired the evidences of patchwork are obliterated by a
surrounding band of fresh plastering, varying in width from 4 inches to
a foot or more. Usually this band is laid on as a thick wash of adobe,
but in some instances a decorative effect is attained by using white.
It is curious to find that at Tusayan the decorative treatment of the
finishing wash has been carried farther than at Zuni. The use of a
darker band of color about the base of a whitewashed room has already
been noticed in the description of a Tusayan interior. On many of the
outer walls of upper stories the whitewash has been stopped within a
foot of the coping, the unwhitened portion of the walls at the top
having the effect of a frieze. In a second story house of Mashongnavi,
that had been carefully whitewashed, additional decorative effect was
produced by t