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Hogan
The Dine, or Navajo people arrived in what is now the area including Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, well after the ancestors of modern Pueblo people had become established there. Along with the Apache people, they probably moved south gradually from western Canada. By A.D.1600, and perhaps as early as A.D. 1000, the ancestors of the Dine had taken up residence in the southwest alongside the ancestors of the Pueblo tribes. The Dine was not organized as a tribe until much later.
The basic architectural form for Dine dwellings is the hogan. Hogans are made in several different styles, but all have the following common features: a single room, a generally circular shape, a central fire pit or stove, and a smoke hole in the center of the roof. The hogan's door faces the rising sun in the east.
Hogan designs. (Drawings based on Nabokov and Easton 1989)
The conical, or forked pole hogan was, according to Dine stories, the structure first created by First Man, under the instruction of Talking God, a very important Dine deity. Later, Talking God taught the people to make the eight-sided corbelled roof hogan, which was to be the home for Changing Woman, also a very important Dine deity. Hogans are considered to be alive, and, as Talking God instructed, must be regularly purified and spiritually "fed." A properly blessed and maintained hogan is essential to the family's hozho (a complex concept meaning beauty, happiness, health, harmony, balance, and goodness).
The four-sided leaning log hogan and the eight-sided corbelled log hogan were the most common types of dwellings in use in the late 19th century, and both are still built today.
The Dine traditional residential group was composed of several households related to each other through the women in the families. Each nuclear family had their own residential hogan, located near each other. The group, sometimes called an "outfit," maintained herds of sheep and horses, and moved to several different locations during the year to ensure adequate water and grazing land for the animals, and firewood for the households. Maize was planted at the summer camp. Ramadas were also an important architectural feature of the summer camp, providing shade from the hot summer sun. Sweat baths were an important feature of the camp as well, and were used for purification to prepare for religious ceremonies.
Source: Nabokov, Peter and Robert Easton. Native American Architecture. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989.
