﻿NO. 7 SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I926 213 



no evidence of being shaped by human hands are most abundant. In 

 this respect the walls are quite unlike those of the buildings situated in 

 the Wupatki National Monument, some 25 miles away, or in the middle 

 valley of the Little Colorado. 



The secular rooms are square or rectangular in shape, but there is 

 one room, recognized at once as dififerent from the others in size and 

 function, which was not secular but rather communal or ceremonial, 

 later identified as a kiva. This kiva was indicated by a depression in 

 the surface and as is customary was situated half underground. It 

 lies near the northeastern corner of the pueblo, surrounded on three 

 sides by secular rooms and by a wall only on the east. It is large 

 and rectangular with rounded corners, a low seat or banquette extend- 

 ing completely around the inner wall. This banquette has no vestiges of 

 pilasters resting on it for roof supports, the roof evidently having 

 been held up by vertical logs- set in the floor. A ventilator shaft opens 

 into the room midway in the east wall at floor level. The vertical 

 portion of this shaft is enclosed by stone masonry bulging from the 

 external wall of the room. The fallen rock and adobe within this 

 ceremonial room rendered it impossible to detect a deflector (wind- 

 shield) or fire hole in the floor, and the indications are from the 

 amount of charcoal and absence of roof beams that there had been a 

 conflagration in this room before or after the pueblo fell into ruins. 

 A comparison of this kiva with one partially excavated at \Vupatki, 

 and with those at Marsh Pass, Arizona, shows a great similarity. 

 This likeness supports an Indian legend that the Marsh Pass people 

 were the same race as the ancient Snake Clan, still represented at 

 Walpi on the East Mesa. Very few objects of Indian manufacture 

 were found in the rooms of Elden Pueblo, and although there were a 

 few bowls and one or two well-preserved human skeletons, these 

 were so few in comparison with mortuary objects from the cemeteries 

 that a consideration of them will be left to a final report on the ruin. 



There were many good metates and manos of customary pueblo 

 shape and several stone implements, axes, mortars, spear-points, 

 arrowheads, and the Hke, a consideration of which would enlarge this 

 preliminary account too much. There should be mentioned, how- 

 ever, a type of paint-grinding stones similar to those from Casa 

 Grande. A spindle whorl may be mentioned because instead of being 

 of stone, thin and perforated like those from the pueblo ruins, it 

 is of clay, thick, almost spherical, like Mexican spindle whorls, identi- 

 cal with several elsewhere figured from Casa Grande. Another form 

 of spindle whorl has a groove around the rim, also suggesting Mexi- 

 can influence. 



