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ANTIQUITIES OF THE MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK
CLIFF PALACE
By JESSE WALTER FEWKES
GENERAL PLAN OF CLIFF PALACE (continued)
REFUSE HEAPS
Almost every Mesa Verde cliff-dwelling has an
unoccupied space back of the rooms,a as in the rear of rooms 28
to 40, which served as a depository for all kinds of rubbish. Here the
inhabitants of Cliff Palace also deposited certain of their dead, which
became mummified on account of the dryness of the air in the cave.
aIsolated cliff-dwellings are scattered
throughout the Southwest, but there are several areas, as the Mesa
Verde, in which they are concentrated. Among these clusters may be
mentioned the Canyon de Chelly the Navaho National Monument, the Red
Rocks area, and that of the upper Gila. One characteristic feature in
which the cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde differ from some others is
the independence of all of the upright walls from support of the sides
of the cliffs, in the cliff-houses of the Navaho Monument a large
majority of the houses have the rear wall of the cave as a wall of the
building; a few of the houses in Cliff Palace have the same, but the
largest number are entirely free from the cliff. This separation on all
sides is due largely to the geological structure of the rear of the
cavern in which the cliff-house stands.
There is also a vacant space between the rear of the
Speaker-chief's House and the cave wall, but this space was almost
entirely free of refuse. The amount of debris in the refuse heaps back
of the so-called plaza quarter lends weight to other evidence that this
is one of the oldest sections of Cliff Palace.
The accumulation of debris was so deep in these
places, and the difficulties of removal so great, that it was not
attempted. It had all been dug over by relic seekers who are said to
have found many specimens therein.b
bWorkmen could operate in these parts only by
tying sponges over their nostrils, so difficult was it to breathe on
account of the fine dust.
SECULAR ROOMS
The majority of the rooms in Cliff Palace were
devoted to secular purposes. These are of several types, and differ in
form, in position, and in function. Their form is either circular or
rectangular, or some modification of these two. As a rule, the secular
rooms lie deep under the cliffs, several extending as far back as the
rear of the cave. The front of Cliff Palace shows at least two tiers or
terraces of secular rooms, the roof of the lower one being level with
that of the floor of the tier above. The front walls of secular rooms
lower than the fourth terrace are as a rule destroyed, but the lateral
walls are evident, especially in the tower quarter. The passage from one
of these terraces to the room above was made by means of ladders or by
stone steps along the corners.
The following classification of secular rooms, based
on their function, maybe noted: (1) Living rooms; (2) milling rooms;
(3) storage rooms; (4) rooms of unknown function;c (5) towers;
(6) round rooms. It is difficult to distinguish in some instances to
which of the above classes some of the rooms belong. The secular houses
were probably owned by the oldest women of the clan, and the kivas were
the property of the men of their respective clans, but courts, plazas,
and pasageways were common property.
cPossibly some of these may have been used
sometimes for ceremonial purposes, or rather for the less important
rites.
ETHNOLOGY
The masonrya of all secular rooms is
practically identical and as a rule is inferior to that of kivas, their
walls varying in width and having a uniform thickness from foundation to
top. There are instances where the lower part projects somewhat beyond
the upper, from which it is separated by a ledge, but this feature is
not common. Minor features of architecture, as floors and roofs, doors
and windows, fireplaces, banks, and cubby-holes, some or all of which
may be absent, vary in form and in distribution according to the purpose
for which the room was intended. The few timbers that remain show that
the beams of the houses were probably cut with stone hatchets aided by
the use of fire. The labor of hauling these timbers and of stripping
them of their branches must have been great, considering the rude
appliances at hand. It would seem that the cliff-dwellers were not
ignorant of the use of the wedge with which to split logs, since the
surfaces of split sticks are always more or less fibrous, never smooth,
as would be expected if metal implements had been used. All
transportation was manual, without the assistance of beasts of burden or
of any but the rudest mechanical contrivances.
aProbably both men and women of one clan
worked together in the construction of houses, the men being the masons,
the women the plasterers. Each clan built its own rooms, and there were
no differentiated groups of mechanics in the community.


Plate 14. SQUARE TOWER, AFTER REPAIRING (top);
OLD QUARTER (bottom) (photographed by R. G. Fuller)
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DOORS AND WINDOWS
There is difficulty in distinguishing doorways from
windows in cliff-dwellings, on which account they are here treated
together. Both are simple openings in the walls, the former as a rule
being larger than the latter. As door openings are regularly situated
high above the floor, there may have been ladders by which the doorways
of the second and third stories were reached. The rooms may have been
entered by means of balconies, evidences of which still remain. No
instance of a hatchway in the roof is now recognizable, although the
absence of side entrances in several rooms implies that there were roof
entrances, several good examples of which occur at Spruce-tree
House.
Doorways of Cliff Palace have two forms, rectangular
and T-shaped the latter generally opening on the second story or in such
a position that they were approached by ladders or notched logs. The
theory that these doorways were constructed larger at the top than at
the bottom so that persons with packs on their backs might pass through
them more readily is not wholly satisfactory, nor does the theory that
the notch at the lower rim served to keep the ladder from slipping
wholly commend itself. No satisfactory explanation of the form of the
T-shaped doorway has been yet determined. Generally the tops of both
doorways and windows are narrower than the bottoms, the sides being
slightly inclined; but the lower part is rarely narrower than the top.
Sills sometimes project slightly, and evidences occur that the sides
as well as the upper part of the window and doorway were made of adobe,
now no longer in place. The jambs also were probably of clay, and the
doors, made of slabs of stone, neatly fitted the orifices.
The prevailing storms in winter at Cliff Palace sweep
up the canyon from the southwest, but there does not seem to have been
a systematic effort to avoid the cold by placing doors and windows on
the opposite side of the building; the openings, for instance, of the
Speaker-chief's House face this direction and are open to storms of snow
and rain. Many of the openings never had doors and windows, but were
probably closed with sticks tied together, or with matting.a
Certain windows were half closed, probably to temper the winter blasts.
The sills of doors were commonly placed a foot or more above the
floor;b transoms above the door opening and peepholes at the side
are not common in Cliff Palace. In some cases a stepping stone projects
from the wall below the door opening to facilitate entrance, in others a
foot hole is found in the same relative place.
aSome of the doorways were filled with rude
masonry; evidently the rooms were thus closed in some instances before
the buildings were deserted.
bThe placing of the sill at a level with the
floor is a modern innovation at Walpi. The oldest houses still have it
elevated, as in Cliff Palace. In some of the cliff-houses of the Navaho
Monument sills and floor levels are continuous.
As the jambs, sills, and lintels were built hard and
fast in the mortar, evidently both door openings and windows were
constructed when the corresponding wall was built. The jambs in some
instances and the lintels in others are of split sticks, the surfaces of
which are fibrous and were evidently not split by means of iron
implements. There is evidence that the size of the door openings was
sometimes reduced by a ridge of mortar which was arched above, as at
Spruce-tree House, the intention being to make in this way a jamb to
hold in place the stone door. There are no round windows of large size,
but both doors and windows are quadrilateral in shape; the small
circular openings in some of the walls may have served for
lookouts.
FLOORS AND ROOFS
Not a single entire roof remained in Cliff Palace,
and only one or two rooms retained remnants of rafters. It would seem,
however, from the position of the holes in the walls into which the
rafters once extended that they were constructed like those of
Spruce-tree House, a good example of which is shown in plate 9 of the
report on that ruin. The floors seem to have been formed of clay
hardened by tramping, but there is no evidence of paving with flat
stones. The hardened adobe is sometimes laid on sticks without bark and
stamped down. Although no instance of extensive rock cutting of the
floor was observed in secular rooms, this is a common feature of kiva
floors. Floors were generally level, but in some instances, when rock
was encountered, the surface was raised in part above the other level.
The majority of the floors had been dug into for buried specimens
before the repair work was begun, but here and there fragments of floors
were still intact, showing their former level. Banquettes or ledges
around the walls are rare. In a few instances the unplastered roof of
the cave served as the roof of the highest rooms.
FIREPLACES
Many fireplaces still remain in rooms, but the
majority are found in convenient corners of the plazas.a The most
common situation is in an angle formed by two walls, in which case the
fire-pit is generally rimmed with a slightly elevated rounded ridge of
adobe. In room 84 there is a fireplace in the middle of the floor. At
one side of this depression there extends a supplementary groove in the
floor, rimmed with stone, the use of which is not known. Although
fireplaces are ordinarily half round, a square one occurs in the
northwestern corner of room 81. All the fireplaces contained wood ashes,
sometimes packed hard; but no cinders, large fragments of charcoal,
or coal ashes were evident. The sides of the walls above the fireplaces
are generally blackened with smoke.
aSmoke on the walls of certain second and
third stories shows that fireplaces were not restricted to the ground
floor.
The fire-holes of the kivas, being specially
constructed, are different in shape from those in secular houses. While
the cooking fire-pits are generally shallow, kiva fire-holes a foot deep
are not exceptional, and several are much deeper. The fire was kindled
in the kiva not so much for heating the room as for lighting it, there
being no windows for that purpose. Certain kinds of fuel were probably
prescribed, but logs were not burned in kivas on account of the heat. No
evidences of smoke-hoods or chimneys have been found in any of the Cliff
Palace rooms. The walls of many kivas showed blackening by soot or
smoke.

Plate 15. SPEAKER-CHIEF'S HOUSE, AFTER REPAIRING
(photographed by R. G. Fuller)
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LIVING ROOMS
It is difficult to distinguish rooms in which the
inhabitants lived from others used by them for storage and other
purposes, since most of their work, as cooking, pottery making, and like
domestic operations, was conducted either on the house-tops or in the
plazas. Under living rooms are included the women's rooms,a or
those in which centered the family life; and, in a general way, we may
suppose the large rooms and those with banquettes were sleeping rooms.
The popular misconception that the cliff-dwellers were of small stature
has undoubtedly arisen from the diminutive size of all the secular
rooms, but it must be remembered that the life of the cliff-dwellers
was really an out-of-door one, the roof of the cave affording the
necessary protection.
aAmong the Hopi the oldest woman, as a clan
representative, owns the living rooms, but kivas are the property of the
men, the kiva chief of certain fraternities being the direct descendant
of the clan chief of the ceremony when limited to his clan.
MILLING ROOMS
There are several rooms in Cliff Palace which appear
to have been given up solely to the operation of grinding corn. The
mills are box-like structures, constructed of slabs of stone set on
edge, each containing a slanting stone called a metate, from which the
mill is called by the Hopi the metataki, or" metate house." The
following description of a metataki in pueblos seen by Castañeda in
1540 applies, in a general way, to the small milling troughs in Cliff
Palace:
One room is appointed for culinary purposes, another
for the grinding of corn; the latter is isolated [not so in Cliff
Palace] and contains an oven and three stones [one, two, three, or four
in Cliff Palace], cemented finely together. Three women sit [kneel]
before these stones; the first crushes the corn, the second grinds it,
and the third reduces it quite to a powder.
In grinding corn, which was generally the work of the
girls or young women, the grinder knelt before the metataki and used a
flat stone, which was rubbed back and forth on the metate. The corn meal
thus ground fell into a squarish depression, made of smooth stones, at
the lower end of the metate. Commonly the corners of this receptacle for
the meal that had been ground were filled in with clay, and on each side
of the metate were inserted fragments of pottery, which rounded the
corners and made it easier to brush the meal into a heap. In room 92,
where there are four metates, occupying almost the whole milling room,
there are upright stones on the side of the wall, back of the place
where the women knelt, against which they braced their feet.
Most of the grinding boxes were destroyed, but those
in the Speaker-chief's house and others west of kiva V, especially the
latter, were still in good condition, the metates being in place.
Evidences of former metatakis were apparent in the floor of several
other rooms, as in a room back of kiva K. It is evident from the number
of metates found in Cliff Palace that several milling rooms, not now
recognizable, formerly existed, and it is probable that every large
clan had its own milling room, with one or more metatakis, according to
necessity. Although many metates without metatakis occur in Cliff
Palace, that in itself is not evidence that they were moved from place
to place by the inhabitants. These milling rooms were apparently
roofed, low, and one-storied, possibly in some instances open on top,
but generally had a small peephole or window for the entrance of light
or for permitting the grinders to see passers-by.
GRANARIES
Under the general name of granaries are included
storage rooms, some of which are situated below living rooms.a
Here corn for consumption was stacked, and if we may follow Hopi customs
in our interpretation of cliff-dwellers' habits, the people of Cliff
Palace no doubt had a supply sufficient to prevent famine by tiding over
a failure of crops for two or more years. Many of these chambers were
without doorways or windows; they were not limited to storage of corn,
but served for the preservation of any food products or valuable cult
paraphernalia. Each clan no doubt observed more or less secrecy in the
amount of corn it kept for future use, and on that account the storage
rooms were ordinarily hidden from view.
aGenetically the room for storage of property
was of earliest construction. This custom, which was necessary among
agriculturists whose food supply was bulky, may have led to the choice
of caves, natural or artificial, for habitation.
The droppings of chipmunks and other rodents show
that these commensals were numerous, and their presence made necessary
the building of storage rooms in such manner that they would be proof
against the ravages of such animals. The three cists constructed of
stone slabs placed vertically, situated back of the Speaker-chief's
House, sometimes called "eagle houses," were probably storage bins; in
support of this hypothesis may be mentioned the fact that the cobs,
tassels, and leaves of corn are said to have been abundant in them when
Cliff Palace was first visited by white men.
Although eagle bones are found in the refuse in the
unoccupied part of the cave back of the houses, their abundance does not
necessarily prove that eagles were confined in them by the inhabitants
of Cliff Palace. Perhaps the eagle nests in the canyon were owned by
different clans and were visited yearly or whenever feathers were
needed, and the dead eagles were probably buried ceremonially in these
places, which therefore may be called eagle cemeteries, as among the
Hopi.b
bSee Property Rights in Eagles, American
Anthropologist, vol. II, pp. 690-707, 1907.

Plate 16. NORTHERN PART, FROM THE SPEAKER-CHIEF'S HOUSE TO THE WESTERN
END
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CREMATORIES
As is well known to students of the Southwest, the
tribes of Indians dwelling along the lower Colorado river disposed of
their dead by cremation, and evidences of burning the dead are found
among all the ruins along the Gila and Salt rivers in southern Arizona.
The custom was also practiced in the San Pedro and Salt River valleys,
and along other tributaries of the Gila river. Castañeda (1540) says
that the inhabitants of Cibola, identified with Zuñi, burned their dead,
but no indication of this practice is now found among existing Pueblos.
The ancient Pueblo inhabitants of the Little Colorado, so far as known,
did not burn their dead, and no record has been made of the practice
among their descendants, the Hopi and Zuñi.
In his excellent work on the ruins of the Mesa Verde,
Baron Nordenskiöld speaks of calcined human bones being found in a stone
cist at Step House, and Mr. Wetherill is referred to as having observed
evidence of cremation elsewhere among the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings.
There can be no doubt from the observations made in the refuse heaps at
Cliff Palace that the inhabitants of this village not only burned their
dead but there was a special room in the depths of the cave which was
set aside for that purpose.a One of these rooms, situated at the
northern end of the refuse heap, was excavated in the progress of the
work and found to contain bushels of very fine phosphate ashes, mixed
with fragments of bones, some of which are well enough preserved to
enable their identification as human. Accompanying these calcined bones
were various mortuary objects not unlike those occurring in graves where
the dead were not cremated. The existence of great quantities of ashes,
largely containing phosphates, apparently derived from the burned
bones, forming much of the refuse, and the densely smoke-blackened roof
of the cave above them, are interpreted to indicate that the dead were
cremated in the cave back of the houses.
aWhile only one place where bodies were burned
was found in Cliff Palace, several such places were found on top of the
mesa. Evidences of similar inclosures occur at Spruce-tree House and at
Step House.
In addition to these burning places, or crematories,
in the rear of the buildings of Cliff Palace, there is good evidence of
the same practice on the mesa top. Here and there, especially in the
neighborhood of the clearings where the cliff-dwellers formerly had
their farms, are round stone inclosures, oftentimes several feet deep,
in which occur great quantities of bone ashes, fragments of pottery, and
some stone objects. The surface of the stones composing these inclosures
shows the marks of intense fire, which, taken in connection with the
existence of fragments of human bones more or less burned, indicate that
the dead were cremated in these inclosures. It is not clear, however,
that the dead were not interred before cremation, and there is reason
for believing that the bodies were dried before they were committed to
the flames. The mortuary offerings, especially pottery, seem to have
been placed in the burning places after the heat had subsided, for
beautiful jars showing no action of fire were found in some of these
inclosures. The existence of cremation among the cliff-dwellers is
offered as an explanation of the great scarcity of skeletons in their
neighborhood. When it is remembered that Cliff Palace must have had a
population of several hundred, judging from the number of the buildings,
and was inhabited for several generations, it otherwise would be
strange that so few skeletons were found. It would appear that the
chiefs or the priestly class were buried either in the ground or in the
floors of the rooms, which were afterward sealed, whereas the bodies of
the poorer class, or the people generally, were cremated. The former
existence of Pueblo peoples who buried their dead in the region between
the Gila valley and Mesa Verde where the dead were cremated is a
significant fact, but further observations are necessary before it can
be interpreted. It may be that in ancient times all the sedentary tribes
practiced cremation, and that the region in question was settled after
this custom had been abandoned.
LEDGE ROOMS
In a shallow crevice in the roof of the cave on a
higher level than the roofs of the tallest houses there is a long wall,
the front of inclosures that may be called "ledge rooms."a Some
of these rooms have plastered walls, others are roughly laid; the latter
form one side of a court and served to shield those passing from one
room to another. On this outer wall, about midway, there is painted in
white an inverted terrace figure, which may represent a rain cloud.
Attention should be called to the resemblance in form and position of
this figure to that on an outside wall overlooking plaza C of
Spruce-tree House. This series of ledge rooms was probably entered from
the roof of a building in front, and the opening or doorway above room
66 served as such an entrance, according to several stockmen who
visited Cliff Palace in earlier days.
aThis type of building is believed to be the
oldest in those sections of the Southwest where cliff habitations
occur.
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Plate 17. DETAILS OF KIVA A (aTunnel to Kiva B (left),
bPassageway with steps to room 3 (right), photographed by R. G. Fuller)
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