O SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 8l 



eastern end-of the village. The owner of the property, Mr. J. D. 

 Martinez, stated that when his father built his corrals and stables, a 

 burial mound was removed to make room for one of the corrals, and 

 that many skeletons were exhumed and reburied a short distance 

 away. 



Small Mound 



At a point about lOO feet from the corrals is located the small 

 mound (pi. i, A) which was the first to be excavated by the writer. 

 There were very few surface indications of a building, and the walls, 

 after excavation, stood only a little over two feet in height. The ruin 

 contained only seven rooms and had no kiva in connection with it. 

 (PI. I, B.) Most of the rooms are unusually large. In room 7 was 

 found a quantity of charred and decayed roof material of the usual 

 type. The walls were exceedingly well mixed and laid up, and the 

 thickness of the plaster indicated long occupancy. The following 

 description of the building of a wall as given in the Castaneda Report 

 of the Coronado Expedition * applies to the construction of the walls 

 at Llano : 



Tiguex. The women being engaged in making the mixture and the walls. 

 .... They had no lime but made a mixture of ashes, coals, and dirt, which 



is almost as good as mortar They gather a great pile of twigs of 



thyme and sedge grass and set it afire, and when it is half coals and ashes 

 they throw a quantity of dirt and water on it and mix it all together. They 

 make round balls of this which they use instead of stones after they are dry, 

 fixing them with the same mixture which comes to be like a stiff clay. 



In the Taos mixture, small pebbles are added. After seeing walls 

 built in the modern pueblos the writer observed that the present 

 method differs from that described by Castaiieda with respect to 

 placing the balls of adobe after they were dry. In cases observed at 

 Santa Clara and other Rio Grande pueblos the balls were put in 

 position before they had dried.* 



Another difference noted at Taos was that the checking of the 

 walls, after they had dried, occurred in irregular masses. In the 

 Chama ruins, and in modern walls, the checking was in more or less 

 regular rectangular masses of different sizes, the cracks running hori- 

 zontally and perpendicularly in the walls. At Taos the cracks in the 

 masses were of all shapes and sizes and did not occur with any 



' Winship, Castaneda Report of the Coronado Expedition. 14th Ann. Rep. 

 Bur. Amer. Ethnol., p. 520. 



"Jeangon, J. A. Excavations in the Chama Valley, New Mexico, Bull. 81, 

 Bur. Amer. Ethnol., p. 11, Washington, 1923. 



