Slide show: What the prefabricated houses at Etowah really looked like

In a previous article, I mentioned that Drs. Kelly and Larson expected to only see simple huts at the Etowah Mounds site, but instead unearthed a diverse range of building shapes and functions.

Unfortunately, the commercial artists’ versions of Etowah all show a town full of little one room huts . . . plus they show all the buildings and earthen mounds with sharp corners. It is absolutely impossible to maintain sharp corners on buildings and mounds, composed of clay plaster and/or packed earth!

As was also typical of southern Mexico, the citizens of Etula (Etowah Mounds) lived in residential compounds, consisting of several specialized buildings. Most of these buildings, including the houses, were constructed by first fabricating wall and roof sections flat on the ground, then assembling them together

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

There is an interesting story behind these slides. Back in 2006, I ran across the photo at the top of the article. It was taken by Dr. Arthur Kelly at Etowah Mounds in 1956.

The image rang a bell. I had seen identical house footings in northern Veracruz back in 1970, while on the fellowship. In fact, I got to see all the phases of traditional Totonac house construction, which are illustrated below.

Out curiosity I looked up the word for “house” (casa in Spanish) in an online Totonac dictionary, maintained by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The Totonac word was “chiki.” Wo! Chikee is the Eastern Creek and Seminole word for a summer house. The same word was used in Itza and Highland Guatemala Maya!

The Muskogee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Koasati and Alabama word for house is Choko. That was the Itza Maya word for “warm.”

I began looking up more Seminole and Muskogee words in the Itza Maya dictionary. There were many, many Itza words in the Muskogean languages and especially in Georgia and eastern Tennessee, the names of rivers, streams and mountains. There must have been direct immigration of Itza Mayas into the Southeast.

Steps for building a prefabricated house in Etula (Etowah)