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 intermediate ledge, which is about 110 feet long and about 30 feet
wide, was practically all occupied by a row of seven rooms, some of them
of more than one story. These rooms are exceptionally large--larger than
any group of rooms in the canyon or in this part of the country. The
outside or front wall is more than 20 feet from the cliff back of it,
and the rooms are from 10 to 15 feet wide. Figure 16, which is a ground
plan of the ruin, shows the exceptional size of these rooms. All of them
were at least two stories high; some were three. The walls in this
portion are generally 2 feet or more thick and exceptionally well
constructed. Its eastern end is still standing to a height of three
stories, and carries a roof intact, giving a tower-like effect to that
portion. Originally this portion rose but one story above the other
rooms. Throughout nearly all its length the front wall shows part of the
upper story, which is also marked on the cliff wall by a thin wash of
clay, in the same manner as in the Casa Blanca ruin. The two rooms west
of the tower were surmounted by a single large room. The cliff wall is
coated with a thin wash of yellowish clay, and no mark of a cross wall
or partition can be seen upon it. There are no openings between the
three eastern rooms on the ground floor. The first room to the west of
the tower has a square chimney-like shaft, and a niche or alcove
connected with it. The second room also has a niche and a rounded shaft.
The third room has neither niche nor shaft.
[Illustration: Fig. 16--Ground plan of Mummy Cave ruin.]
The front wall was exceptionally heavy, but the upper portion has fallen
inward, forming a heavy mass of debris against it. The east and south
sides of the tower, for about 5 feet of its height, are decorated by
inlaying small stones 1 to 2 inches long and half an inch thick. The
same decoration occurs at intervals down the front wall, but
irregularly. This feature is not chinking, such as has been described,
and has no constructive value, but is purely decorative. Back of the
rooms west of the tower there are some old pictographs on the cliff wall
at the place where the roof abutted on it. Here the wash of clay before
mentioned was necessarily omitted. In the first room there is a
pictograph of a man, in the second a semicircle, both done in
light-green paint.
The lower part of the outer corner of the tower has fallen out. At this
point there was a small doorway or opening, which was the only entrance
on the south or east. The corner which has fallen was apparently
supported by three or four sticks laid horizontally on the rock at an
angle of 45 degrees with either wall. The giving way of the timber
support apparently caused the fall of the corner, but why a structure
otherwise so substantial should be placed on such frail support, when a
filling of masonry was both easy and practicable, is not clear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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