84 THE CLIMATIC FACTOR AS ILLUSTRATED IN ARID AMERICA. 



Farther south, or at lower altitudes, the rooms were larger, for there it was easy to keep 

 warm. 



The low temperature of the Pajaritan Plateau does not appear to have diminished the 

 number of inhabitants. Frijoles Canyon alone, within a distance of not over 1.5 miles 

 up and down the narrow gorge, had a population of fully 2,000 souls according to the 

 estimate of Dr. Edgar L. Hewett, Director of the J-'chool of American Archeology, who 

 was personally in charge of the excavations. The actual number of rooms, including the 

 village amphitheater, the caves, and the cliff dwellings, appears to have amounted to 

 about 3,000. At present, according to Judge Abbott, who owns all the valley except the 

 ruius, the amount of land that can be irrigated amounts to 21 acres. The ancient Pajaritans 

 could scarcely have existed unless they cultivated the plateau where now not a solitary 

 person makes a living from the fruits of the earth. Therefore Dr. Hewett is unqualifiedly 

 of the opinion that the climate of the past was moister than that of the present. 



Let us now consider an apparently older and more widely scattered occupation of the 

 country. During our visit to the plateau we watched carefully not only for cave dwellings 

 and villages of the Tyuonyi type, but for the little mounds which here and there, at a distance 

 from all the main sources of water both past and present, proclaim the location of houses 

 scattered over the plateau. One not closely on the watch may miss these entirely, for 

 they are merely small heaps of stones. In the space of 7 miles we saw houses of this type 

 within sight of the road in 49 different places. Inasmuch as several houses were often 

 clustered in one group, the total number of dwelhngs was 67. They were obviously mere 

 farm-houses, but some had from 8 to 20 rooms, and must have been inliabited by more 

 than one family. Therefore in our 7-mile ride through the open, park-Uke forest we must 

 have found the dwellings of approximately 100 famihes within sight of the road. It would 

 be a populous farming district in any part of England where one could find 100 families on 

 7 miles of road. We can not, of course, assume that every one of these houses was occupied 

 at one time, but it is not probable that any large number were vacant at a time when new 

 ones were being built. The blocks of stone used in their construction would seem to be 

 too valuable to permit of their being wasted when new houses were to be erected. Even 

 in these days of metal tools, beasts of burden, and wheeled carts many great ruins of western 

 Asia are in imminent danger of being utterly destroyed by the natives, who carry away the 

 stone for use in new houses, even though the present population is only a fraction of that 

 of the past. In the days of the Pajaritans, when the blocks of stone had to be hewn with 

 stone axes and carried from the quarries in the canyons on the backs of men or rather of 

 women, we can scarcely believe that the people were so extraordinarily industrious, or so 

 superstitious, that for generation after generation they would leave good stones in ruins 

 close at hand and go to the labor of obtaining new ones. Therefore we are inchned to 

 believe that at the height of the prosperity of this region practically every one of the 

 present ruins was a house occupied by one or more famiUes. 



These scattered Uttle ruins of farm-houses, almost unnoticed even by the archeologist, 

 present one of the most interesting problems in American archeology. The potsherds 

 found in them are different from those in the larger villages or in the majority of the cliff- 

 dweUings immediately around them. The pottery of the farms, as Mr. Chapman points 

 out, is almost wholly a fine-grained ware painted white and adorned with geometrical 

 designs in black. In the larger, more modern ruius, however, only a little of this is found, 

 while the commonest kinds are a coarser white ware with more abundant curves in the 

 designs, and a wholly different tjq^e of red ware adorned with black figures decorated with a 

 species of glaze. These differences, coupled with other evidence, such as the manifestly 

 greater age of the small isolated ruins, show that here, even more plainly than in the 

 Chaco region, we have to do with two occupations as distinct from one another (and from 



