CASA GRANDE UVIN 



By Cosmos Mindelepp 



INTRODUCTION. 



LOCATION AND CHARACTER. 



The Casa Grande ruin, situated near Gila river, iu southern Arizona, 

 is perhaps the best kuowu specimen of aboriginal architecture iu the 

 United States, and no treatise ou American antiquities is complete with- 

 out a more or less extended description of it. Its literature, which 

 extends over two centuries, is voluminous, but of little value to the 

 practical scientific worker, since hardly two descriptions can be found 

 which agree. The variations in size of the ruin given by various 

 authors is astonishing, ranging from 1,500 square feet to nearly 5 acres 

 or about 200,000 square feet in area. These extreme variations are 

 doubtless due to diflereuce of judgment as to what portion of the area 

 covered by remains of walls should be assigned to the C'asa Grande 

 proper, for this structure is but a portion of a large group of ruins. 



So far as known to the writer no accurate plan of the Casa Grande 

 ruin proper has hitherto been made, although plans have been pub- 

 lished; and very few data concerning the group of which it forms a 

 part are available. It would seem, therefore, that a brief report pre- 

 senting accurate plans and careful descriptions may be of value, even 

 though no pretention to exhaustive treatment is made. 



HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 



The earlier writers on the Casa Grande generally state that it was 

 in ruins at the time of the first Spanish invasion of the country, in 1540, 

 and quote in support of this assertion Castaueda's description of a ruiu 

 encountered on the march.' Castaiieda remarks that, "The structure 

 was in ruins and without a roof." Elsewhere he says that the name 

 "Chichilticale"was given to the place where they stopped because the 

 monks found in the vicinity a house which had been inhabited by a 

 people who came from Cibola. He surmises that the ruin was formerly 



• Castaiieda in Temaux-Compana. Voyage de Cibola. French text, p. 1, pp. 41, 161-162. (The original 

 text — Spanish— is in the Lenox Library ; no English translation has yet been published. 



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