Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park: Cliff PalaceFewkes, Jesse Walter
History
Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park: Cliff Palace
Fewkes, Jesse Walter
Colorado -- Antiquities; Mesa Verde National Park (Colo.)
As the jambs, sills, and lintels were built hard and fast in the mortar,
evidently both door openings and windows were constructed when the
corresponding wall was built. The jambs in some instances and the
lintels in others are of split sticks, the surfaces of which are fibrous
and were evidently not split by means of iron implements. There is
evidence that the size of the door openings was sometimes reduced by a
ridge of mortar which was arched above, as at Spruce-tree House, the
intention being to make in this way a jamb to hold in place the stone
door. There are no round windows of large size, but both doors and
windows are quadrilateral in shape; the small circular openings in some
of the walls may have served for lookouts.
FLOORS AND ROOFS
Not a single entire roof remained in Cliff Palace, and only one or two
rooms retained remnants of rafters. It would seem, however, from the
position of the holes in the walls into which the rafters once extended
that they were constructed like those of Spruce-tree House, a good
example of which is shown in plate 9 of the report on that ruin. The
floors seem to have been formed of clay hardened by tramping, but there
is no evidence of paving with flat stones. The hardened adobe is
sometimes laid on sticks without bark and stamped down. Although no
instance of extensive rock cutting of the floor was observed in secular
rooms, this is a common feature of kiva floors. Floors were generally
level, but in some instances, when rock was encountered, the surface was
raised in part above the other level. The majority of the floors had
been dug into for buried specimens before the repair work was begun, but
here and there fragments of floors were still intact, showing their
former level. Banquettes or ledges around the walls are rare. In a few
instances the unplastered roof of the cave served as the roof of the
highest rooms.
FIREPLACES
Many fireplaces still remain in rooms, but the majority are found in
convenient corners of the plazas[34]. The most common situation is in an
angle formed by two walls; in which case the fire-pit is generally
rimmed with a slightly elevated rounded ridge of adobe. In room 84 there
is a fireplace in the middle of the floor. At one side of this
depression there extends a supplementary groove in the floor, rimmed
with stone, the use of which is not known. Although fireplaces are
ordinarily half round, a square one occurs in the northwestern corner of
room 81. All the fireplaces contained wood ashes, sometimes packed hard;
but no cinders, large fragments of charcoal, or coal ashes were evident.
The sides of the walls above the fireplaces are generally blackened with
smoke.
[Footnote 34: Smoke on the walls of certain second and third stories
shows that fireplaces were not restricted to the ground floor.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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