﻿NO. 5 SMITHSONIAN ENl'I.ORATIONS, 1922 IO5 



residence of a single social unit having a men's room or kiva in the 

 center of the women's rooms or those used for grinding and storage 

 of corn, sleeping, cooking, and other purposes. 



The kiva (fig. 102) of this ruin is t}pical of a cliff-house sanctuary. 

 Its architecture is normal, the floor being cut down a short distance 

 into the solid rock and covered with a white earthy deposit. The 

 roof was supported on six pilasters between each pair of which there 

 is a banquette, that on the south side being larger than the others. 

 In the floor there is a circular fire pit, near which is a deflector facing 

 a ventilator. There is also a large slf^af^fi or ceremonial opening in 

 the floor. The surface of the north banquette has its ledge lowered 

 to a level below that of the others, and in the wall above it is a recess 

 that served, no doubt, for the idol. A slab of stone formerly used 

 to close this recess lay on the kiva floor below it. A structural peculi- 

 arity was observed in the wall of One Clan House. As a rule kiva 

 walls are built of horizontal masonry, but here the walls above the 

 banquettes were made of upright stone slabs. 



A well-worn trail, prol^ably originally made by Indians, connects 

 Far View House, Pipe Shrine House, and One Clan House with 

 Spruce-tree House. Since the Indians abandoned the Mesa this trail 

 has been deepened by stock seeking water and by herdsmen ; it was 

 also formerly used by all early tourists who visited the ruin on horse- 

 back before the construction of roads. 



An important result of the archeological work of the Bureau of 

 American Ethnology at the Mesa Verde the past summer, 1922, is 

 new information on the use of towers revealed by the excava- 

 tion and re])air of h'ar \'iew Tower. This building (fig. 103) is 

 situated north of Far \'iew House, about midway between it and 

 " Mummy Lake,"' and when work began on it no walls were visible : 

 the site was covered with sage bushes, and fallen stones strewn over 

 the surface had raised a mound a few feet high, which is now a fine 

 circular tower surrounded by low walled basal rooms. Three kivas 

 were revealed on the south side where formerly no evidences of their 

 existence appeared. Two of these (figs. 104. 105) were completely 

 excavated and a third showed evidences of a secondary occupation. 

 After this kiva had been used for a time, no one knows how long-, it 

 was filled with debris and fallen stones on which new walls were built 

 by subsequent occupants. The masonry of the rooms they built is 

 much inferior to that of their ])re:lecessors, the original builders of 

 the kivas, and probably contemporaneous with the low walls east and 

 north of the tower. 



