Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744Fewkes, Jesse Walter
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Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895: Seventeenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1895-1896, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1898, pages 519-744
The left chamber is 6 feet 6 inches broad, and from one corner,
opposite the doorway, a low passageway leads into a circular chamber,
6 feet in diameter, with its floor below the platform of the lateral
room. Between the chamber, on the left of the entrance, and the open
air, the wall of solid rock is broken by a slit-like crevice, which
allows the light to enter, and no doubt served as a window. A recess,
the floor of which is elevated, on a platform opposite the doorway, is
5 feet broad, and has a small circular depression in one corner. The
floor and upraise of this recess is plastered with adobe, which in
several places is smooth and well made.
In comparing the remaining cavate dwellings of this series with that
described, we find every degree of complication in the arrangement of
rooms, from a simple cave, or irregular hole in the side of the cliff,
to squared chambers with lateral rooms. The room _I_,[16] for
instance, is rectangular, 6 feet long by 3 feet wide, with an entrance
the same width as that of the room itself.
In room _III_, however, the external opening is very small, and there
is a low, narrow ledge, or platform, opposite the doorway. There is
likewise in this room a small shelf in the left-hand wall. In _IV_
there is a raised platform on two adjacent sides of the square room,
and the doorway is an irregular orifice broken through the wall to the
open air.
Room _IV_ is a subterranean chamber, most of the floor of which is
littered with large fragments of rock which have fallen from the roof.
It has numerous small recesses in the wall resembling cubby-holes
where household utensils of various kinds were undoubtedly formerly
kept. This room is instructive, in that the entrance is partially
closed by two walls of masonry, which do not join. The stones are
laid in adobe in which fragments of pottery were detected. These
unjoined walls leave a doorway which is thus flanked on each side by
stone masonry, recalling in every particular the well-known walls of
cliff houses. Here, in fact, we have so close a resemblance to the
masonry of true cliff houses that we can hardly doubt that the
excavators of the cavate dwellings were, in reality, people similar to
those who built the cliff houses of Verde valley.
Room _VIII_ is a simple cave hewn out of the rock, with a chamber
behind it, entered by a passageway made of masonry, which partially
fills a larger opening. The doorway through this masonry is small
below, but broadens above in much the same manner as some of the
doorways in Tusayan of today.
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