ANCIENT D WELLING S OF THE RIO VERDE VALLEY. 747 



On turning to the fourth volume of Hubert H. Bancroft's Na- 

 tive Races of the Pacific States, which is devoted to the study of 

 antiquities, I was surprised to find that the extensive ruins of the 

 Verde were at that time (1875) undescribed and unknown, save 

 through vague accounts received from Mr. Leroux and other 

 guides and trappers. On page 636 we read : " These ruins are not 

 very far from Prescott in the north and Fort McDowell in the 

 south ; and I regret not having been able to obtain from officers 

 in the Arizona service the information which they must have ac- 

 quired respecting those remains, if they actually exist, during the 

 past ten or fifteen years." Some of these ruins have since been 

 examined by archaeologists accompanying Government surveying 

 parties, and models of several of them are to be seen in eastern 

 museums ; but no exhaustive account of them has ever been writ- 

 ten, nor have any been more than superficially explored. 



The writer has availed himself of the opportunity afforded by 

 numerous tours of field-service and authorized hunting expedi- 

 tions, amounting in the aggregate to several thousand miles of 

 travel, to examine most of the principal ruins in the territory, 

 from the famous Casa Grande of the Gila itself to the smaller 

 casas and caves on the head-waters of its tributaries. Although 

 highly diverse in form, style, material, and location, it is evident 

 that these buildings belonged to a single race. This is shown by 

 the similarity of products and identity of habits, as well as by the 

 relation of the dwellings to each other. The implements and pot- 

 tery found in the rude caves of the Upper Verde are identical with 

 those which Mr. Cushing has recently obtained from the immense 

 casas grandes of Salt River. In all, the food substances and mode 

 of agriculture are essentially the same. Again, the proudest casas 

 grandes are built on the summits of cliffs whose sides are honey- 

 combed with cave-dwellings, thus combining in a single commu- 

 nity the most diverse styles of habitations. 



Only the aboriginal monuments of the Verde region will here 

 receive attention. They are uniform with those of the rest of the 

 Gila Basin. In fact, little violence would be done by uniting all 

 of our southwestern ruins with those of the northern tier of Mexi- 

 can States into a single group. They were the work of substan- 

 tially the same people. 



The accompanying map indicates the location of only such 

 remains as are personally known to the writer. Detailed descrip- 

 tions of all of them would prove tedious to the reader and exceed 

 our present limits. 



The walled buildings are of two kinds — those occupying natural 

 hollows or cavities in the faces of cliffs, and those built in exposed 

 situations. The former, whose walls are protected by sheltering 

 cliffs, are sometimes found in almost as perfect a state of preserva- 



