FEWKES: UNIT TYPE OF PUEBLO ARCHITECTURE 547 



The conclusion arrived at by a comparative study of the 

 simple or complicated designs on cliff-dwellers' pottery is that 

 they represent a past stage of culture, and that the presence 

 of the same in pueblo ruins accompanied by more complicated 

 designs, realistic or symbolic, is a survival. 



Bearing in mind what is said above, let us pass to the con- 

 sideration of the causes that have led to the formation of the 

 ''unit type" from the pre-puebloan. The main cause is a desire 

 for protection from enemies, which led to the choice of sites for 

 habitations on inaccessible mesa tops or in caves. In some 

 instances the "unit type" was formed in the open, directly from 

 the pre-puebloan, but in certain localities it was developed in 

 caves. 



Nordenskiold seems to the author to have expressed better 

 than any other archeologist the cause which developed the pueblo 

 form of architecture. He writes: "The manner in which the 

 villages are built, the numerous small rooms huddled together 

 in one large structure, and the several stories rising in terraces 

 one above another can be explained only on the assumption 

 that this architecture was developed during the construction 

 of houses in the caves, where the crowded grouping of the apart- 

 ments and the erection of several stories were necessitated by 

 the confined space. This circumstance has already been pointed 

 out by Cushing with respect to the Zuni villages."^ The author 

 regrets that this writer has not discussed more at length the 

 evidences which led him to state so confidently that there was 

 a secondary occupation of some of the cliff-houses of the Mesa 

 Verde. He writes "We are forced to conclude that they [cliff- 

 houses] were abandoned later than the villages on the mesa," 

 and, later, "they [cliff -houses] were first abandoned, and had 

 partly fallen into ruin, but were subsequently repeopled, new 

 walls being now erected on the ruins of the old." The rea- 

 son for this belief he briefly states to be the ''superposition 

 of walls constructed with the greatest proficiency on others built 

 in a more primitive fashion." This difference in masonry might 



^ The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde. Stockholm, 1893. 



