Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 179-262Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
Aboriginal Remains in Verde Valley, Arizona: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 179-262
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities; Verde River Valley (Ariz.) -- Antiquities
Connected with the main room by a passageway 2 feet long cut in its
eastern wall, there is an almost circular chamber 7 feet in diameter,
and this in turn connects with another chamber beyond it by a passageway
2½ feet long and less than 2 feet wide. The roofs of the two chambers
last mentioned are but 4½ and 4 feet, respectively, above the floor, and
in none of the rooms of this group, except the main apartment, are
pockets or niches found. The whole group extends back about 45 feet into
the bluff.
BOWLDER-MARKED SITES.
Within the limits of the region here treated there are many hundreds of
sites of structures and groups of rooms now marked only by lines of
water-rounded bowlders. As a rule each site was occupied by only one or
two rooms, although sometimes the settlement rose to the dignity of a
village of considerable size. The rooms were nearly always oblong,
similar in size and ground plan to the rooms composing the village ruins
already described, but differing in two essential points, viz, character
of site and character of the masonry. As a rule these remains are found
on and generally near the edge of a low mesa or hill overlooking some
area of tillable land, but they are by no means confined to such
locations, being often found directly on the bottom land, still more
frequently on the banks of dry washes at the points where they emerge
from the hills, and sometimes on little islands or raised areas within
the wash where every spring they must have been threatened with overflow
or perhaps even overflowed. An examination of many sites leads to the
conclusion that permanency was not an element of much weight in their
selection.
Externally these bowlder-marked sites have every appearance of great
antiquity, but all the evidence obtainable in regard to them indicates
that they were connected with and inhabited at the same time as the
other ruins in the region in which they are found. They are so much
obliterated now, however, that a careful examination fails to determine
in some cases whether the site in question was or was not occupied by a
room or group of rooms, and there is a notable dearth of pottery
fragments such as are so abundant in the ruins already described.
Excavation in a large ruin of this type, however, conducted by some
ranchmen living just above Limestone creek, yielded a considerable lot
of pottery, not differing in kind from the fragments found in stone
ruins so far as can be judged from description alone.
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