508 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
end of a timber originally felled and brought in as a ceiling beam. 
All but No. 7 come within the known range of Late Bonitian construc- 
tional activity. 
Between and behind the posts, loosely built walls divide the cave 
into haphazard compartments, each filled with sandstone-and-adobe 
rubble. They are binlke structures, erected solely to confine the 
rubble fill while it was being packed in, cave-roof high. Mud alone 
lies under the rear middle of the rock and, again, under the east end. 
None of the stonework resembles that of the Old Bonitians. 
Blind old Hosteen Beyal (Judd, 1954, pp. 348-346), who came to 
Chaco Canyon as a boy about 1840, surprised me with the accuracy 
of his description of constructional details here. His only error, 
as far as I know, was in remembering the posts as oak rather than pine. 
There are those who hold that the veneered rubble under the 
Braced-up Cliff was designed to shield the basal zone of soft sand- 
stone from erosion and, to be sure, its presence undoubtedly did 
accomplish that function. But this fortunate consequence was ac- 
cidental rather than the result of deliberate planning. If protection 
from wind and water had been their sole intention the Bonitians 
assuredly would not have gone to the trouble of wedging in a dozen 
10-inch posts, each slanted against anticipated pressure from over- 
head. And they would have been content with a narrow protective 
wall under the outer edge of the overhang instead of the sturdy, 
slope-faced structure they actually erected. If erosion control were 
the only desideratum there would have been no need for the casual, 
rubble-filled bins behind the facing, or for the terrace and 80-foot 
adobe bank below the level of the cave floor. 
It was fear that drove the Late Bonitians to brace their cliff—a 
persistent fear lest 30,000 tons of sandstone topple upon them. If 
that same fear was shared in any degree by the actual founders of 
Pueblo Bonito we discovered no evidence of it. There is nothing 
behind the upper stonework or in the facing of the lower terrace 
that even remotely resembles Old Bonitian masonry. Nevertheless 
the danger Jatent in the overtowering cliff was there when the Old 
Bonitians began their ancient settlement and if they failed then to 
sense that danger it is probably because the great blocks of sand- 
stone previously fallen from the cliff were already concealed under 
a blanket of windblown sand. 
A “boulder,” thus distinguishing it from normal building stones, 
was utilized as it lay in the bench of an abandoned kiva 8 feet below the 
floor level of Old Bonitian Room 83 (Pepper, 1920, p. 269). Describ- 
ing the constructional confusion he found in the adjoining room, 85, 
Pepper (ibid., p. 282) notes that “a large sandstone boulder” likewise 
was incorporated in the wall of a west-end storage bin. Pepper cor- 
rectly identified partially razed Old Bonitian walls beneath the floor 
