620 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1910. 



pueblo, but on entering the inclosures one sees in the middle of each 

 floor a vertical entrance through which the the inhabitants descended 

 to a subterranean chamber, excavated in the solid rock. This under- 

 ground chamber was entered from lateral rooms by doorways which 

 also had been excavated in the lava conglomerate. From the plaster- 

 ing on the walls of these rooms it is evident that they were not used 

 simply for storage, but served for habitations and were true pit 

 dwellings.^ Let us consider still another example of these early 

 subterranean houses with vertical entrances inhabited by the abo- 

 rigines of Arizona. Certain iniins on the Little Colorado have under- 

 ground rooms that indicate even better than the Old Caves the char- 

 acter of pit-room culture antedating the free buildings called pueblos. 

 Some of the best of these exist in considerable numbers in a cluster 

 of ruins near the Black Falls of the Little Colorado, These rooms 

 are underground, single, multiple, or arranged in rows, being gen- 

 erally found in the shelter of a low outcropping rock formation some- 

 times occurring at the base of a low cliff on top of which is a pueblo 

 ruin. Their form is generally round or they have rounded corners, 

 one side being the cliff walls. A row of underground rooms of this 

 type morphologically resembles a series of subterranean kivas. There 

 is nothing to show that they were specialized for ceremonial pur- 

 poses, but they are believed to belong to the type of subterranean 

 dwelling called a " pit room," of which the kiva is the modern sur- 

 vival. 



Some of the Armenian cave dwellings belong to that type of cavate 

 house characterized by a vertical entrance. In the writings of Xeno- 

 phon there is said to occur the following reference to these troglodytes 

 visited by Polycrates and certain others of his command: "Their 

 houses were underground, with entrances like that of a well, though 

 they were spacious below. The entrances for the animals were dug 

 out, but the men descended by means of ladders. In these houses 

 there were goats, cows, chickens, and the young of the same. The 

 animals were fed on hay inside the houses, which also held a store 

 of wheat, barley, vegetables, and barley-beer in gTeat vessels." 



As in certain Southwestern cavate houses some of the cave villages 

 of Asia Minor had a series of houses above ground which were occu- 

 pied, and another series, subterranean in position, entered by tunnels, 

 and advantageously situated for protection from foes. The use of 

 the underground rooms as places of refuge, those in the open serving 

 as habitations, may furnish a clue to the use of cavate rooms under 

 or behind houses in prehistoric New Mexico and Arizona. 



The Asiatic excavated rooms were used by their inhabitants for 

 protection against Ibrahim Pasha, who, with an Egyptian army in a 



^ I recognize in these pit rooms the precursors of the subterranean kivas, the vertical 

 entrance repi'esenting a hatchway. 



