NO. D7 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, IQI6 107 
and by the presence of numerous stone disks, in and about the 
mounds. The roofs were flat and, as in most primitive southwestern 
habitations, were oftentimes utilized as workrooms. 
One of the most interesting discoveries made during the course 
of the Paragonah excavations was that of a circular room which, 
with similar remains previously discovered in the Beaver City 
mounds, tends to establish the use of the kiva, or ceremonial chamber, 
by the prehistoric house-building peoples of western Utah. The 
importance of this discovery is quite evident when one recalls that 
many of the clans composing the modern Pueblo settlements in 
Arizona and New Mexico constantly point to the north as the general 
Fic. 112.—Walls of ancient adobe dwellings exposed at Paragonah, Utah, 
in 1Q16. 
location of their ancestral homes. It is well known that many of 
these clans once occupied cliff-villages such as those so widely dis- 
tributed throughout the upper San Juan drainage, villages in which 
the circular kiva reached its highest development. Students of south- 
western archeology have labored many years with the problem of the 
origin of the cliff-dweller culture; the round rooms associated with 
villages of detached adobe houses in western Utah, together with 
the artifacts recovered from such houses, suggest that a solution 
of the problem may yet be found in the unknown canyons north and 
west of the Rio Colorado. It is earnestly hoped that the reconnois- 
sance of western Utah may be concluded in the near future in order 
that the information resulting therefrom may be used in correlation 
