BRACED-UP CLIFF, PUEBLO BONITO—JUDD 503 
masonry, slanted rearward to the overhang, and they built an enor- 
mous terrace to support the masonry. 
Tn 1920 when I first saw the Braced-up Cliff, portions of its buttress- 
ing walls still stood two-thirds their original height, but time and the 
elements had taken their toll (pl. 2, fig.2). Seekers after firewood had 
cut off or pried out every post within reach; sheep and goats had 
found shelter behind the standing masonry. ‘Two years later, 1922, 
with our research program well under way, I cleared a portion of the 
lower terrace wall in order to ascertain the character of its stonework. 
That wall, which proved to be only a veneer, was composed of laminate 
sandstone blocks separated at intervals by single courses of dressed 
friable sandstone, the whole forming a variety of local masonry that I 
have elsewhere described as Type 3 (pl. 3, fig. 2). It identifies con- 
struction of the terrace with the heyday of Pueblo Bonito, during or 
shortly following the first major rebuilding program of the Late 
Bonitians. Behind the veneer, tons of sandstone fragments, laminate 
and friable, lie bedded in tons of adobe mud. 
More of this terrace facing was visible in 1887 when Victor Min- 
deleff photographed it (pl. 2, fig. 1). From what now remains, I be- 
lieve the platform to have been 18 or 20 feet high when intact and with 
an average width of 25 feet. Its facing, anchored at the east on an out- 
cropping of sandstone, extends thence almost due west 187 feet where 
the end is lost under a pre-1877 rockfall. Throughout its visible length 
the terrace front inclined cliffward perceptibly. Gathering the sand- 
stone fragments and mixing mud for the rubblework behind were an 
enormous task, and the need must have seemed very real and compel- 
ling to those who ordered it. 
In August of the following year, 1923, after we had discovered a 
hard, fairly smooth adobe pavement 2 feet below the north foundation 
of Room 184, we promptly undertook to follow that pavement toward 
the terrace. To our surprise it continued to and under a sloping bank 
of mud mortar piled steplike against the terrace masonry (pl. 4, fig. 2). 
At the time it seemed so obvious that this masonry must extend down 
to the pavement that I resisted the temptation to destroy part of the 
bank in order to be positive. Below the pavement is a deposit of hard 
clay, in part broken and granular; above it, 4 feet of windblown sand 
containing clay pellets, silt streaks, and occasional potsherds. A1- 
though no indication of weakness was apparent in the 5-foot-wide 
section we laid bare, it may be that the terrace front had bulged some- 
what from pressure of the rubble behind and that the adobe bank was 
piled up against it in support. 
A second surprise was the difference in the stonework here and that 
in the section, only a few feet to the east, we had exposed the year 
before. The earlier exhibit resembled our third-type masonry, but 
