Tikchik village: a nineteenth century riverine community in ... - Cluster

254 FIELDIANA: ANTHROPOLOGY, VOLUME 56were intact, as was the tunnel.Roof logs were a tangled mass thatEvenoverlaid everything and made excavation slow and tedious.before the sod was stripped, roof logs and other debris were visible.Only the entryroom was bereft of timber and in that way resembledthose attached to the dwelling units. Kashgee 1 was by far the mostdistinct and therefore the most recent looking structure on the siteprior to excavation.Fig. 17. Reconstruction of a wall in kashgee 1.The construction of kashgee 1 is different in many respects fromthat of any of the dwelling units. To begin with, the walls consistedof vertical-hewn spruce planks that extended almost from the sodlevel to the tops of the benches. The lower ends of these planksrested on a solid foundation of split logs which apparently had beenlaid, flat surface up, as soon as the excavation for the structure wascompleted and which outlined the main chamber at the bench level.The vertical wall planks, some of which were as much as 46 cm. wide,had been carefully beveled along the edgts to obtain a closer fit.They were held in place by two horizontal logs, one of which stretchedthe entire length of each wall near the sod level, and the other nearor at the bench floors. The upper horizontal logs were held in placeby short vertical supports set at intervals flat against the verticalwall planks; the upper logs rested on these. The lower logs were heldin place by short vertical supports which were driven into the benchfloors and wedged the horizontal logs against the vertical wall planks.Since all these structural features were intact, or virtually so, alongall four walls, it was possible to reconstruct the wall approximatelyas it must have appeared at the time the kashgee was in use(Fig. 17).There were benches on all four sides of this structure and those onthe sides were covered with hewn spruce planks. Under these planks,and on the surface of the other two benches, was a concentrated dark