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Ramada (shelter)
In the southwestern United States, a ramada is a temporary or permanent shelter equipped with a roof but no walls, or only partially enclosed. Ramadas have traditionally been constructed with branches or bushes by aboriginal Americans living in the region (deriving from the Spanish ''rama'', meaning "branch"). However, the term today is also applied to permanent concrete, wooden, or steel structures used to shelter objects or people from the sun. For example, public parks in desert areas of the United States may contain ramadas with picnic tables, restrooms, water sources, etc. Since sunlight is more of an environmental hazard than wind or snow or rain in this part of the world, a roof alone provides substantial shelter. And because there are no walls in the structure, airflow is unrestricted, helping to keep the temperature below the roof substantially cooler than ambient. An example of a large modern-day ramada can be seen at the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indigenous Peoples Of The Americas
The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples. Many Indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers and many, especially in the Amazon basin, still are, but many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture. While some societies depended heavily on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming, hunting, and gathering. In some regions, the Indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, chiefdoms, states, kingdoms, republics, confederacies, and empires. Some had varying degrees of knowledge of engineering, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, writing, physics, medicine, planting and irrigation, geology, mining, metallurgy, sculpture, and gold smithing. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by Indigenous peoples; some countries have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spanish Language
Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Americas and Spain. Spanish is the official language of List of countries where Spanish is an official language, 20 countries. It is the world's list of languages by number of native speakers, second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese; the world's list of languages by total number of speakers, fourth-most spoken language overall after English language, English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindustani language, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu); and the world's most widely spoken Romance languages, Romance language. The largest population of native speakers is in Mexico. Spanish is part of the Iberian Romance languages, Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
Casa Grande Ruins National Monument ( ood, Siwañ Waʼa Ki: or ''Sivan Vahki''), in Coolidge, Arizona, just north-east of the city of Casa Grande, preserves a group of Hohokam structures dating to the Classic Period (). History of the area The national monument consists of the ruins of multiple structures surrounded by a compound wall constructed by the ancient people of the Hohokam period, who farmed the Gila Valley in the early 13th century. "Archeologists have discovered evidence that the ancient Sonoran Desert people who built the Casa Grande also developed wide-scale irrigation farming and extensive trade connections which lasted over a thousand years until about . "Casa Grande" is Spanish for "big house" (''Siwañ Wa'a Ki:'' in O'odham); these names refer to the largest structure on the site, which is what remains of a four-story structure that may have been abandoned by 1450. The structure is made of caliche, and has managed to survive the extreme weather conditions fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Huts
A hut is a small dwelling, which may be constructed of various local materials. Huts are a type of vernacular architecture because they are built of readily available materials such as wood, snow, ice, stone, grass, palm leaves, branches, hides, fabric, or mud using techniques passed down through the generations. The construction of a hut is generally less complex than that of a house (durable, well-built dwelling) but more so than that of a shelter (place of refuge or safety) such as a tent and is used as temporary or seasonal shelter or as a permanent dwelling in some indigenous societies.Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) © Oxford University Press 2009 Huts exist in practically all nomadic cultures. Some huts are transportable and can stand most conditions of weather. Word The term is often employed by people who consider non-western style homes in tropical and sub-tropical areas to be crude or primitive, but often the designs are based on trad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pavilions
In architecture, ''pavilion'' has several meanings: * It may be a subsidiary building that is either positioned separately or as an attachment to a main building. Often it is associated with pleasure. In palaces and traditional mansions of Asia, there may be pavilions that are either freestanding or connected by covered walkways, as in the Forbidden City ( Chinese pavilions), Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and in Mughal buildings like the Red Fort. * As part of a large palace, pavilions may be symmetrically placed building ''blocks'' that flank (appear to join) a main building block or the outer ends of wings extending from both sides of a central building block, the ''corps de logis''. Such configurations provide an emphatic visual termination to the composition of a large building, akin to bookends. The word is from French (Old French ) and it meant a small palace, from Latin (accusative of ). In Late Latin and Old French, it meant both ‘butterfly’ and ‘tent’, becaus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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