crsHixG] CUFF TOWN ARCHITECTURE. 345 



cliambers were coiistnicted almost always out in front of the terraced 

 dwelling cells of tlie women and children, and thus in the more exposed 

 months of the caverns or shelters the villages nestled in. These I'ound 

 assembly rooms or kivas were often, indeed, built up from sloping por- 

 tions of the sheer outer edge t)f the village cave shelf, in order to be as 

 much as possible on a level with or even below the limited ground space 

 between them and the houses farther back, so that the front along the 

 lower and outermost row of these house cells might remain open and 

 unobstructed to passage. 



The dwelling rooms or house cells themselves were made as nearly 

 rectangular as was practicable, for only partitions divided them; but 

 of necessity such as were jilaced far back toward or against the encir- 

 cling and naturally curved rock walls, or the rear masonry walls, built 

 in conformity to their curvature in all the deeper caves, had small 

 triangular or keystone-shape spaces between their partitions. These, 

 being too small for occupancy even by children, were used as store- 

 rooms for grain and other household supplies. When the cave in 

 which a village was built happened to be very deej), the living rooms 

 could not be carried too far hack, as neither light nor sufflcient air 

 could reach them there; hence here, chiefly against the rear wall or the 

 cave back itself, were built other storerooms more or less trapezoidal 

 in shape, according to the degree of curvature in the rock face against 

 which they were built, or, as said before, of the rear wall itself, which 

 in the deeper caves often reached from floor to roof and ran ])arallel to 

 the natural semicircnlar back of the cavern. 



Against the rearward face of such back walls when present (that is, 

 between them and the rear of the cave itself), behind the village 

 proper, if space further permitted, small rooms, ordinarily of one story, 

 or pens, sometimes roofless, were built for tlie housing of the flocks of 

 turkeys which tlie cliff dwellers kept. Beyond these poultry houses 

 was still kept, in the deeper village caves, a space, dark and filled with 

 loose soil and rubbish, in which certain of the dead, mostly men, were 

 buried; while other dead were interred beneath tlie floors of the lower- 

 most rooms, when the soil or sand filled in to level up the sloiiing 

 rock bottom of the shelter was sufficiently deep to receive them. 



A noteworthy peculiarity of the doorways in the upper stories leading 

 toward the rearward storerooms already described was that they were 

 often madeT-shape; that is, very narrow at the bottom and abruptly 

 widened at the top. This was done in order to avoid the necessity of 

 making these openings for entrance and egress too large proportionally 

 to the small size of the I'ooms. Thus, neither were the walls weakened 

 nor were the inmates needlessly exposed to cold; for fuel, even of the 

 lightest kind, was gathered with risk and transi)orted thither with 

 great difficulty, and the use of it was therefore limited to cookery, and 

 yet a person bearing a back load of corn or other provender might, by 

 stepping first one foot, then the other, through the narrow lower ])ortion 



