Besides houses, some of the Amerinds of the South-west dwelt in shelters excavated wholly or in part in the face of a cliff or mountain, or hill. There are four localities where these cavate lodges occur in numbers, the northern Rio Grande valley, the San Juan River valley, the San Francisco mountain region, and the Rio Verde valley in Arizona. There are in these places thousands of cavate lodges. They average in size two or three rooms, sometimes communicating by a ledge, sometimes, often, in fact, with excavated connections. Some of the Verde group[200] are cut back a long distance into the rock—forty or fifty feet. The rooms are both oblong and circular, about seven feet high and ten by seventeen feet in size, or eight or ten feet diameter, according to the shape. There were no chimneys, the fire-pits being near the entrances. Nor were there any windows, the doorway being the only opening to the outside. Floors were levelled by filling depressions with adobe clay and low ridges were built up of the same material, probably to keep the inmates off the bottom, which must have sometimes been damp. Poles or willows laid across the ridges with skins on them would have made a flooring. Depressions at the back walls appear to have been made to hold water, and doubtless at times there was a “seepage” of considerable amount, as I have suggested regarding the open conchoidal caves occupied by the Cliff-dwellers. What appear to be stepping-stones are found in some entrances, as if water at times flowed out. The Verde group are in a soft grey sandstone, the Rio Grande in tufa, the San Francisco in cinder hills. These cavate dwellings are simply another form of Amerind residence due to necessity or expedience.[201] In other places there are some that were undoubtedly merely farming outlooks, occupied only during the crop season, just as there are cliff houses for this purpose, and also houses erected singly in open valleys. But many cavate lodges were actual residences for a period of years, owing to circumstances of one kind or another. The Cliff-dwellers may still be found among the Tarahumaris of northern Mexico. Schwatka describes some who “had walled up the outward face of a cave nearly to the top, leaving the latter for ventilation.” Many small cliff-dwellings in other places were so made to allow the smoke to escape. That is, the wall along the outer edge of the cavity was not carried quite up to the rock above, so that the smoke could drift out. There was, therefore, no roof over the dwelling, but it was sheltered by the overhanging rock. Many more examples of this adaptation of the dwelling to circumstances might be added.