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What kinds of houses did they live in?
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The plateau people had two kinds of houses: winter houses and summer houses.
Winter houses were permanent village houses. Summer houses were
portable and lightweight.
Winter dwellings were of two main types, the semi-subterranean earth lodge and
the mat-covered surface house.
The average earth lodge was circular, with a pit 4-6 feet (1-2 meters) deep and a
diameter of 10-40 feet (3-12 meters). The roof was conical or flat and was supported by
leaning poles fastened to some central posts.
The smoke hole in the top was also the entrance, the floor being reached
by an inside ladder or notched log.
The mat-covered surface house was apparently more recent and existed only in the
southern Plateau, where it had replaced an older earth lodge. It was made of
two walls of varying length leaning together and covered with tule mats.
It was a "longhouse" with a series of hearths in the middle, each one of them
shared by two families, one on each side. It was replaced in its turn by the
Plains Indian tepee.
During the summer people lived in conical mat lodges of small size or in simple
windbreaks.
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