MESA VERDE PUEBLO FEWKES. 485 



buildings in the La Plata and Animas Valleys have long ago been 

 recognized as a likeness of culture, but whether the latter are older 

 or more modern than the Mesa Verde pueblos is still one of the 

 many unsolved problems awaiting additional research. 



If the plateau building excavated owes its form to a survival of that 

 developed in caves, it is therefore evidently of later construction and 

 this would indicate that the pueblos of the San Juan and its tribu- 

 taries are also of later date than the cliff dwellings, or, in other words, 

 that architectural characteristics of Mesa Verde pueblos were origi- 

 nally formed in cliffs and the congested forms there produced were 

 later transmitted to the valleys. 



The Mesa Verde pueblo presents no certain evidence that its type 

 of building is more modern than the cliff-house phase, but if the 

 above conclusion be correct a natural corollary would be that identi- 

 cal open-air communit}^ houses in the San Juan and its tributaries 

 were settled subsequent to the cliff dwellings of which the Mummy 

 Lake settlement is a survival. Although we have no way of telling 

 how old the Mesa A^erde cliff dwellers or plateau habitations are in 

 terms of the Christian calendar, the writer, unlike some other arche- 

 ologists considers them comparatively modern ; which does not mean, 

 however, that man has not lived on the mesa in some degree of culture 

 for a long time previously, but only that he was not a cliff dweller 

 or a Pueblo Indian several thousand years ago. AVe have some 

 evidence of the existence of a pit-house culture, with certain kinship 

 to the puebloan, but the age of this no man knows with any more 

 precision than he does the cause which forced man originally to 

 make any kind of a home in the secluded fastnesses of the Mesa 

 Verde. 



An answer to the last and most difficult of all questions, " AVliat 

 became of the inhabitants? " is implied in the preceding lines. The 

 writer has held that the cliff dweller constructed a pueblo after he 

 abandoned the caves, and believes man later moved to the valleys, 

 where his culture still survives. This culture is most apparent among 

 the least modified living pueblos, as the Hopi. Of course it is not 

 claimed that individual clans migrated directly to the Hopi coimtry 

 from Mesa Verde, but their culture traveled down the San Juan River 

 Valley and ultimately was brought to Hopi land. 



It is certain that some of the Hopi clans lived in cliffs. The Snake 

 people have definite legends that they once inhabited the great cliff 

 houses of the ISTavaho National Monument Betatakin and Kitsiel. 

 These Hopi legends, and similar stories found among other pueblos, 

 are supported by many facts besides architectural and ceramic re- 

 semblances. Ownership in eagle nests near cliff ruins are claimed 

 through inheritance by the Snake clans, because they were ancestral 

 73839°— SM 1916 32 



