NO. I ARCHITECTURE OF PUEBLO BONITO — JUDD 21 



opinion that, by lowering the water table, the buried channel was 

 chiefly responsible for the denudation of Chaco Canyon and destruc- 

 tion of Bonitian farmlands. 



Chuco Canyon pioneers. — In his study of local geology, Bryan 

 observed artifacts of the Bonitians and their contemporaries in the 

 upper 4 feet of the valley fill. Below that level every potsherd was 

 a product of Early Pueblo (P. I) or Basket Maker peoples. These 

 were the pioneers of Chaco Canyon ! They lived in slab- walled, earth- 

 covered houses or in single-room pits dug deep into the valley floor, 

 the roofs supported by four posts. 



One such pit-dwelling, on the south side of the canyon opposite 

 Pueblo Bonito, was partially excavated in 1920 (U.S.N.M. Nos. 

 315892-901) ; two years later caving of the arroyo bank a mile to the 

 east exposed a second pithouse, its floor 12 feet 2 inches below the 

 present surface (Judd, 1923, p. 136; 1924&, p. 404). After its 

 abandonment 6 feet of floodwater silt and sand was deposited above 

 roof level. Charred timbers from this buried home have been dated 

 A.D. 720 and 777 (Douglass, 1935, p. 44, fn. 1 ; Smiley, 1951, p. 19) ; 

 pottery and other artifacts (U.S.N.M. Nos. 324801-844) are typically 

 P. I, as Roberts (1938) stated in correcting an earlier misinterpreta- 

 tion. 



A third pit-dwelling, its floor at a depth of 13^ feet, had been 

 half washed away before we discovered it. What remained hung 

 in the west bank of a narrow gully 9 miles east of Pueblo Bonito 

 (Judd, 1927, p. 168). On the opposite bank and 13 feet higher, a 

 small P. Ill ruin was partially cleared by Frank Roberts that same 

 summer, 1926, as he tested a nearby BM. Ill village site for the 

 Pueblo Bonito Expeditions (Judd, ibid., p. 165). A year later 

 Roberts completed excavation of this village for the Bureau of Ameri- 

 can Ethnology and has so ably reported its distinctive features 

 (Roberts, 1928, 1929) there is no need herein to review the results 

 of his 1926 testing. Shabik'eshchee is the only Late Basket Maker 

 village known in Chaco Canyon, but there may be others. 



The surviving portion of that gully bank pit-dwelling was described 

 by Roberts as "Arroyo House." Under an equally appropriate name, 

 "Half House," the same remnant was rediscovered and redescribed 

 by Adams (1951) who postulates two "separate and distinct" occupa- 

 tion levels, lists 11 types among its potsherds, and cites Deric 

 O'Bryan's tree-ring dates of A.D. 700-740 for charcoal fragments in 

 the initial fill. Both Adams and Roberts classify this ancient dwelling 

 as Basket Maker III but the same evidence could as easily read 



