The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1894-95, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, pages 73-198Mindeleff, Cosmos
History
The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona: Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1894-95, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1897, pages 73-198
Mindeleff, Cosmos
Arizona -- Antiquities; Chelly, Canyon de (Ariz.); Cliff-dwellings -- Arizona; Pueblo Indians -- Antiquities
The interior of the room, like the circular kivas already described,
appears to have been plastered with a number of successive coats, all
except the last being heavily stained by smoke. If the structure were a
chimney, it was a dismal failure. The tunnel was made at the time the
wall was erected, and passes under the bowlder over which the wall was
built. A little east of the opening, inside the room, the bowlder shows
through the wall, projecting slightly beyond its face.
[Illustration: Fig. 79--Section of chimney-like structure in
ruin 15.]
Outside of the room the corner of the bowlder was chipped off, as shown
on the plan, to permit the rounding of the shaft, the east, west, and
south sides of which were built up with small pieces of stone, a kind of
lining of masonry. There was also an outside structure of masonry, but
how high above the ground it extended can not now be determined. A small
fragment of this masonry is still left on the upper surface of the
bowlder and is shown in the section.
Figure 80 is a plan of another example, which is attached to the
circular kiva in ruin No. 16. This ruin is described on page 129. The
kiva had an interior bench and the floor is 2 feet above its top. On the
south side nearest the cliff edge the bench is interrupted to give place
to a structure much like that described above. In this case, however,
there was no convenient bowlder, and the roof of the tunnel has broken
down so that the method of support can not be accurately determined.
Probably it consisted of slabs of rock, as the span is small, and a
number of large flat stones were removed from the tunnel in excavating.
The top of the tunnel is on the level of the top of the bench, as shown
in figure 81, which is a vertical section. An inspection of the plan
will show that the circular wall of the kiva is complete and that the
inclosing rectangular wall was added later. The shaft was built at a
still later period, and the line or junction marking its inner surface
shows plainly in the interior of the tunnel. The general view of the
ruin (plate LI) shows the exterior of the shaft, and the horizontal
timbers on which the masonry is supported are shown in plate LII.
In front of the tunnel a flat piece of stone was placed on the floor,
and in front of this again, about 2 feet from the mouth of the tunnel,
there was an upright mass of masonry composed of stone and mud, and
forming a curtain or screen before the opening. The original height of
this structure was the same as that of the interior bench.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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