Los Muertos covered a large area and contained thirty-six communal buildings and many small houses. It was a settlement which could not have existed without irrigation, and ditches have been traced which brought water to it from the Salt River. The largest single building was a great rectangular house enclosed on all four sides by a massive wall which reached a thickness of seven feet in some places. Some of the outer walls of the big house achieved a comparable thickness. In addition to the main structure, the compound contained plazas and small house clusters. Another ruin contained two large house clusters. Here some of the rooms had very thin walls, as do the Hohokam houses of Sedentary and early Classic times. At Los Muertos the Hohokam and the Salado people apparently lived side by side, each clinging for the most part to their own traditions. This divergence was particularly marked in the disposal of the dead. The Saladoans usually buried their dead under house floors or in the plaza. The body was normally extended, with the head to the east. Pottery, jewelry, and some stone artifacts served as grave offerings. The Hohokam continued to practice cremation. The dead were placed on wooden gratings over shallow pits, and the grating was consumed with the body. The unconsumed bones and ashes were placed in jars and buried in special plots near the refuse heaps. There seems to have been some borrowing between the two groups, for occasionally inhumations are found accompanied by the red-on-buff pottery of the Hohokam, and a few cremations have been found with Salado offerings or in polychrome vessels. This borrowing, however, seems to have been sufficiently limited to make it possible, on the basis of the numbers of burials and cremations, to estimate what the comparative ratio of Hohokam to Salado people may have been. On this basis, the Hohokam appear to have outnumbered the foreign element by a ratio of three to one. [Illustration: Fig. 51—Great House built by the Salado people. Casa Grande National Monument, Arizona. (Courtesy National Park Service.)]