In the classification by Morley and Kidder and the
majority of writers, sites rather than structural features are adopted
as a basis, although all recognized that large cliff-dwellings like
Cliff Palace are practically pueblos built in caves. In the following
classification more attention is directed to differences in structure
than to situation, notwithstanding the latter is convenient for
descriptive purposes.
1. Villages or clusters of houses, each having the
form of the pure pueblo type. The essential feature of the pure type is
a compact pueblo, containing one or more unit types, circular
kivas of characteristic form, surrounded by rectangular rooms. These
units, single or consolidated, may be grouped in clusters, as Mitchell
Spring or Aztec Spring Ruins; the clusters may be fused into a large
building, as at Aztec or in the community buildings on Chaco
Canyon.
2. Cliff-houses. These morphologically belong to the
same pure type as pueblos; their sites in natural caves are insufficient
to separate them from open-sky buildings.
3. Towers and great houses. These buildings occur
united to cliff-dwellings or pueblos, but more often they are
isolated.
4. Rooms with walls made of megaliths or small stone
slabs set on edge.
In reports on the excavation of Far View House [1]
on the Mesa Verde, the author called attention to clusters of
mounds indicating ruined buildings in the neighborhood of Mummy Lake, a
little more than 4 miles from Spruce-tree House. This cluster he
considers a village; Far View House, excavated from one of the mounds,
is regarded as a prehistoric pueblo of the pure type. The forms of other
buildings covered by the remaining mounds of the Mummy Lake site are
unknown, but it is probable that they will be found to resemble Far View
House, or that all members of the village have similar forms.
1A Prehistoric Mesa verde Pueblo and its People.
Smithson. Rept. for 1916, pp. 461-488, 1917. Far View House—a Pure
Type of Pueblo Ruin. Art and Archaeology, vol. vi, no. 3, 1917.
This grouping of small pueblos into villages at Mummy
Lake on the Mesa Verde is also a distinctive feature of ruins in the
Montezuma Valley and McElmo district. In these villages one or more of
the component houses may be larger and more conspicuous, dominating all
the others, as at Goodman Point, or at Aztec Spring. The houses
composing the village at Mud Spring were about the same size, but at
Wolley Ranch Ruin only one mound remains, evidently the largest, the
smaller having disappeared.
The third group, towers and great houses, includes
buildings of oval, circular, semicircular, and rectangular shapes.
Morphologically speaking, they do not present structural features of
pueblos, for they are not terraced, neither have they specialized
circular ceremonial rooms, kivas with vaulted roofs surrounded by
rectangular rooms, or other essential features of the pueblo type. The
group contains buildings which are sometimes consolidated with
cliff-houses and pueblos, but are often independent of them. In this
type are included castellated buildings in the Mancos, Yellow Jacket,
McElmo, and the numerous northern tributary canyons of the San Juan.
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