MORTARS IN ROCK IN PLACE One of the characteristic features of the Mimbres ruins, but not peculiar to them, are mortars or circular depressions worn in the horizontal surface of rock in place. They are commonly supposed to have been used as mortars for pounding corn, and vary in size from two inches to a foot in diameter, being generally a foot deep. We find them occurring alone or in clusters. Good examples of such depressions are found near the Byron ruin, in the neighborhood of the ruins along Whiskey Creek, at Oldtown, and elsewhere. There is a fine cluster of these mortars nine miles from Deming, near the pictographs in the Cook’s Range. Similar mortars have been repeatedly described and often figured. Mr. Webster has given the most complete account of this type of mortars in a description of the ancient ruins near Cook’s Peak.[22] On the surface of the southwestern point of a low hill to the north of an ancient ruin at Cook’s Peak, according to this observer, occurs a feature which the writer had nowhere else seen, save on the east side of the same mountain. I refer to the great number of mortars which occur in this sandstone back a few feet to the north of the ruins, and which were made and long used by the ancient pueblo-dwellers. There exists at this one place fifty-three of these mortars, nearly all of them occurring in an area of surface not more than seventy-five or eighty feet in diameter.... Nearly all the mortars are circular or sub-circular in outline, symmetrical and smooth inside, and the upper edge or margin usually rounded by the pestle. In a few cases, however, these mortars have an oblong or subovate outline, somewhat like some forms of metates found among the ruins. These mortars often contract to a point at the bottom, when circular in marginal outline, although at times are longer than broad, as just stated, and in this case have a more flattened bottom. They vary from two to eleven inches in diameter, the smallest forms being those apparently only just begun, and are few in number. The deepest mortar observed was seventeen inches, though the great majority of them would vary perhaps from four to ten inches in depth. Often the rock was smooth and polished around the margin of the mortars, and [their distances apart] vary from a few inches to several feet from each other. At times these mortars would be located on the top of a large block of sandstone which might happen to occupy this area; these boulders sometimes being four to five feet in diameter and perhaps four feet in height. It was plain to be seen that this ancient mill-site was long used by these peculiar people, but just why so many quite similar mortars should have been made here and used by these people is a matter of conjecture.