MlNDELEKFl 



EXTENT OF TILLAGE. 247 



small temporary shelters or farming outlooks, occupied only during the 

 season when the fields about them were cultivated and during the 

 gathering of the harvest, as is the case with analogous structures used 

 in the farming operations among the pueblos of to-day. Their number 

 and distribution do not necessarily signify that all the terrace was 

 under cultivation at one time, although there is a fair presumption 

 that the larger part of it was, and the occurrence of the ditch at both 

 the upper and the lower ends of the area strengthens this conclusion. 



As it is impossible that an area so large as this should be cultivated 

 by the inliabitants of one village, it is probable that a number of vil- 

 lages combined in the use of this terrace for their horticultural opera- 

 tions; and, reasoning from what we know to have been the case in other 

 regions, it is further i)robable that this combination resulted in endless 

 contention and strife, and perhaps finally to the abandonment of these 

 fields if not of this region. The rectangular ruin already illustrated is 

 situated on a hill south of the terrace and overlooks it from that 

 direction ; on the opposite side of Clear creek, on the hill bounding the 

 valley on the north, there are the remains of a large stone village which 

 commanded an outlook over the terraces in question ; and a little farther 

 up the creek, ou the same side and similarly situated, there was another 

 village which also overlooked them. There were doubtless other vil 

 lages and small settlements whose remains are not now clearly distin- 

 guishable, and it is quite probable that ^ome of the inhabitants of the 

 large villages in tlie vicinity, like those near Verde, hardly 3 miles north- 

 ward, had a few farming houses and some land under cultivation on this 

 terrace. 



Thus it will be. seen that there was no lack of cultivators for all the 

 tillable land on the terrace, and there is no reason to suppose that the 

 period when the land «vas under cultivation, and tlie period when the 

 villages overlooking it were occupied, were not identical, and that the 

 single-house remains scattered over the terrace were not biiilt and occu- 

 pied at the same period. The relation of the stone villages to the area 

 formerly cultivated, the relation of the single-room remains to the area 

 immediately about them, the character of the remains, and the known 

 methods of horticiilture followed by the Pueblo Indians, all support 

 the conclusion that these remains were not only contemporaneous but 

 also related to one another. - 



