4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 63 



stretch of desert from Deming to the Mexican boundary. Regarding 

 the ruins on the Upper Mimbres, Bandelier writes: 1 



Toward this center of drainage the aboriginal villages on the Rio Mimbres 

 have gravitated as far south nearly as the flow of water is now permanent. 

 They are very abundant on both sides of the stream, wherever the high over 

 hanging plateaux have left any habitable and tillable space ; they do not seem to 

 extend east as far as Cook s Range, but have penetrated into the Sierra Mim 

 bres farther north, as far as twenty miles from the river eastward The 



total number of ruins scattered as far north as Hincks Ranch on a stretch of 

 about thirty miles along the Mimbres in the valley proper, I estimate at about 



sixty I have not seen a village whose population I should estimate at 



over one hundred, and the majority contained ten. They were built of rubble 

 in mud or adobe mortar, the walls usually thin, with overwings, and a fireplace 

 in thie corner, formed by a recess bulging out of a wall. Toward the lower end 

 of the permanent water course, the ruins are said to be somewhat extensive. 



Professor U. Francis Duff, in an article on the &quot; Ruins of the 

 Mimbres Valley,&quot; 2 adds a number of new sites to those mentioned 

 above and contributes important additions to our knowledge of the 

 prehistoric culture of the valley. 



Dr. Walter Hough, who compiled from Bandelier and Duff, and 

 made use of unpublished information furnished by Professor De 

 Lashmutt and others, enumerates twenty-seven ruins in the Silver 

 City and Mimbres region to which he assigns the numbers 147-174. 

 Many more ruins 3 might have been included in this list, but it is not 

 the author s purpose, at this time, to mention individual pueblo sites 

 but rather to call attention to the evidences of ruins in the Lower 

 Mimbres Valley as an introduction to the study of pottery there col 

 lected. The ruin from which the majority of the bowls here con 

 sidered were obtained does not appear to have been mentioned by 

 Bandelier, Duff, or Hough. 



The last-mentioned author makes the following reference to figures 

 on the pottery from the Mimbres region : &quot; The decoration is mainly 

 geometric. From the Mimbres he [Professor De Lashmutt] has seen 

 a realistic design resembling a grasshopper, and from Fort Bayard 

 another representing a four-legged creature. Mrs. Owen has a 



1 Archaeological Institute of America, American Series, vol. 4, Final Report, 

 Part 2, pp. 356, 357- 



2 American Antiquarian, vol. 24, p. 397, 1902. 



3 Bandelier (op. cit., p. 357) speaks of sixty ruins in a small section thirty 

 miles along the river. 



