FEWKESj ANTIQUITIES OF MESA VEEDE NATIONAL PAEK 15 



The diameter of one circular room, or estufa, is sixteen feet and six inches. 

 There are six piers, which are well plastered. There are five recess-holes, which 

 appear as if constructed for shelves. In several rooms we observed good fire- 

 places. In another room, where the outer walls have fallen away, we found 

 that an attempt had been made at ornamentation : a broad band had been 

 painted across the wall, and above it is a peculiar decoration which shows in 

 one of our photographs. The lines are similar to embellishment on pottery 

 which we found. We observed in one place corn-cobs imbedded in the plaster 

 in the walls, showing that the cob is as old as that portion of the dwelling. 

 The cobs, as well as kernels of corn which we found, are of small size, similar to 

 what the Ute squaws raise now without irrigation. We found a large stone 

 mortar, which may have been used to grind the corn. Broken pottery was 

 everywhere; like specimens in the other cliff houses, it was similar in design to 

 that which we picked up in the valley ruins near Wetherill's ranch, convincing 

 us of the identity of the builders of the two classes of ruins. We also found 

 parts of skulls and bones, fragments of weapons, and pieces of cloth. One 

 nearly complete skeleton lies on a wall waiting for some future antiquarian. 

 The burial-place of the clan was down under the rear of the cave. 



Dr. W. R. Birdsall," who in 1891 gave an account of the cliff- 

 dwellings of the canyons of the Mesa Yerde, Avhich contains consider- 

 able information regarding these buildings, thus refers specially to 

 Cliff Palace: 



Richard Wetherill discovered an unusually large group of buildings which 

 he named " The Cliff Palace," in which the ground plan showed more than one 

 hundred compartments, covering an area over four hundred feet in length and 

 eighty feet in depth in the wider portion. Usually the buildings are continuous 

 where the configuration of the cliffs permitted such construction. 



In the following account Baron Nordenskiold has given us the 

 most exhaustive description of Cliff Palace yet published : '' 



In a long, but not very deep branch of Cliff Canon, a wild and gloomy gorge 

 named Cliff Palace Canon, lies the largest of the ruins on the Mesa Verde, 

 the Cliff Palace. Strange and indescribable is the impression on the traveller, 

 when, after a long and tiring ride through the boundless, monotonous pinon 

 forest, he suddenly halts on the brink of the precipice, and in the opposite cliff 

 beholds tJie ruins of the Cliff Palace, framed in the massive vault of rock above 

 and in a bed of sunlit cedar and pinon trees below (PI. XII). This ruin well 

 deserves its name, for with its round towers and high walls rising out of 

 the heaps of stones deep in the mysterious twilight of the cavern, and defying in 

 their sheltered site the ravages of time, it resembles at a distance an enchanted 

 castle. It is not surprising that the Cliff Palace so long remained undiscovered. 

 An attempt to follow Cliff Palace Canon upward from Cliff Caiiou meets with 

 almost insurmountable obstacles in the shape of huge blocks of stone which 

 have fallen from the cliff's and formed a barrier across the narrow water course, 

 in most parts of the caiion the only practicable path between the steep walls of 

 rock. Through the pinon forest, which renders the mesa a perfect labyrinth to 



" JoMr. Avier. Oeog. Soc, xxiii^ no. 4, 598, New York, 1891. 



* In The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (a translation in English from the Swedish 

 edition, Stockholm, 1893), (pp. 59-66), unfortunately not accessible to most readers on 

 account of the limited edition and the cost. For this reason the description is here repro- 

 duced in extenso. (The references to illustrations and the footnotes in this excerpt follow 

 Nordenskiold.) 



