58 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 



examined. The most remarkable was a village of sixty-two underground 

 dwellings, situated near the summit of one of the volcanic foot-hills of 

 the San Francisco Mountains in Arizona. The surface stratum of the 

 hill had by exposure become hardened, and formed the common roof for 

 the entire community. The dwellings were excavated after a common 

 pattern, and a description of one will convey an idea of the whole. 

 They had no communication beueath the surface, and were only accessi- 

 ble by means of square holes leading from the surface by a vertical 

 shaft to the main room of the dwelling. Foot-rests — holes at convenient 

 distances along the sides of the shaft — served the purposes of a stair- 

 way. At the bottom of the shaft was found an oval-shaped arched-roofed 

 room, about twenty feet in its smallest diameter. At the ends and on 

 the sides opposite the entrance low doorways connected the main room 

 with smaller rooms, the whole suite of rooms or dwelling consisting of 

 four apartments. One of the smaller rooms had its floor excavated to 

 a depth of two or three feet below the floors of the other rooms, and is 

 supposed to have served the purpose of a store-room or cellar for the 

 ancient occupant. The other small rooms may have been sleeping rooms. 

 A groove 18 inches deep by 15 in width, extending from the floor of the 

 main room up one side of the shaft to the surface of the hill, its bottom 

 filled with ashes and its sides blackened by smoke, formed the fire-place 

 and chimney of the establishment. Around the mouth of the shaft a 

 stone wall was found, forming by its inclosure a kind of door-yard to the 

 dwelling below. Considerable debris was found in these dwellings, an 

 examination of which led to the discovery of many curious objects, 

 illustrating some of the social and domestic customs of the inhabitants. 



Stone mauls and axes, the implements used in excavating the dwell- 

 ings; pottery bearing a great variety of ornamentation; bone awls, 

 and needles of delicate workmanship; the metate or family grinding- 

 stone for grain, its well-worn surface indicating long use; shell and 

 obsidian ornaments and implements of wood, the uses of which were 

 undiscoverable, were among the trophies of the exploration. Search 

 was made for a water-course or spring, but no appearance of the exist- 

 ence of water in the neighborhood was discovered. 



There were signs of intercommunication between this village and a 

 cliff-city some 15 miles distant, which indicated the contemporaneous 

 inhabitancy of the two. 



This city, or rather cluster of villages, also a new discovery, occupied 

 the sides of a canon which has recently been christened Walnut Canon. 

 The sides have been gullied by storms and torrents, leaving shallow, 

 cave-like places of great length at different heights, along the bottoms 

 of which, wherever the ledge furnishes a sufficient area, dwellings in 

 groups or singly were built. The season was well advanced when the 

 place was reached, and only little time was spent in its exploration. 



All the ancient methods of approach have been loug worn away, and 

 access to the nearest of the groups of houses was a work of difficulty. 



