This work documents the skills and purposes of Indian builders of dwellings. It shows how the structures of tribal architecture respond "as much to the inner environment of cultural presupposition and social interaction as to the external environment of wind and weather". [12 quoting anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt]. Photographs and drawings on almost every page. The three hundred or so tribal groups of North America, when Columbus arrived, had arranged their settlements "according to singular patters and principles passed on from generation to generation". Folklorist Alan Dundes calls these "inherited traditional forms". Another testament to morphological determinism.