470 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



fensive sites were very carefully planned for military strength. 

 The finest example of this is the pre-Columbian structure known as 

 Pueblo Bonito, an ancient site at the foot of a cliff in Chaco Canyon. 

 This site has been intermittently under process of excavation for 

 thirty years." No modern village is so compact and well planned as 

 this ruin. At a still earlier stage the village Indians often moved 

 their towns bodily into a cave in the cliffs. It is unquestionably true 

 that cliff dwellings represent a bygone stage in the history of these 

 Southwestern or " Pueblo " tribes. The cliff ruins, which have been 

 well known for fifty years and often illustrated, contain the same 

 square rooms and the same circular, subterranean ceremonial rooms, 

 and, it might be added, the same general types of pottery, basketry, 

 stone implements, and ceremonial objects as the modern pueblos. 



Recent excavators have brought to light a still earlier stage of 

 culture preceding the cliff dwellers — that of the so-called "basket 

 makers." Apparently before the southwestern tribes built the great 

 composite clusters of square or rectangular structures which we call 

 pueblos or cliff dwellings, they had small scattered structures, each 

 family in a separate house. The houses, only scanty ruins of which 

 have so far been brought to light, were apparently circular, sub- 

 terranean, and entered through the roof ,^ These round houses repre- 

 sent the very beginning of masonry in this region, and the people 

 were basket makers rather than potters. 



The process by which isolated, circular, underground houses be- 

 came square or rectangular chambers in aboveground structures is 

 a little puzzling. According to Cushing it was not a replacement 

 of one type of dwelling by a different type but a gradual modifica- 

 tion. As the people became more successful farmers, they moved, 

 Cushing thinks, into the cliffs for security for themselves and for 

 the little stores of corn about which they seem to have been even 

 more concerned. The structures came to be built above ground 

 because they could not be excavated in the rock of the cave floors. 

 They became rectangular as the mere result of being crowded to- 

 gether in the limited confines of a cavern. For the same reason 

 they came to be piled one upon another. Meanwhile the ceremonial 

 chambers were made underground at any hazard, eitlier by digging 

 in or by building around and heaping over. Some kivas both 



» The National Geographic Society has exploration under way at Pueblo Bonito under 

 Neil M. Judd of the Smithsonian Institution. See Natl. Geogr. Mag., vol. 39, 1921, 

 pp. 637-643 ; vol. 41, 1922, pp. 321-331 ; vol. 44, 1923, pp. 99-108, and the Annual 

 Reports of the Smithsonian Institution. 



« M. R. F. and H. S. Colton : The Little-known Small House Ruins in the Coconino 

 Forest, Memoirs Amer. Anthropol. Assn., vol. 5, 1918, pp. 101-126 ; reference on p. 126 ; 

 Walter Hough : Exploration of a Pit House Village at Luna, N. Mex., Proc. U. S. Natl. 

 Museum, vol. 55, 1919, pp. 409-431 ; reference on p. 415 ; N. M. Judd ; Archeological 

 Investigations at Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 74, No. 5. 

 Washington, D. C, 1923, pp. 134-143 ; reference on p. 141. 



