NO. I ARCHITECTURE OF PUEBLO BONITO — JUDD 23 



Pueblo Bonito was in ruin when the National Geographic Society 

 began its explorations in the spring of 1921, The pine and fir tim- 

 bers "in excellent condition" seen by Simpson, Jackson, and Min- 

 deleff had been pulled out or sawed off; many individual door and 

 ventilator lintels had been dislodged or severed with steel axes. Local 

 Navaho charge this vandalism to "sheep herders" and "soldiers" and 

 perhaps with some justification but part of the blame lies elsewhere. 

 In his letter of June 8, 1921, to the National Geographic Society, 

 S. L. Palmer observed that wood from the old ruin was 

 used for fuel when he and his family accompanied Richard Wetherill 

 to Pueblo Bonito in October, 1895. Later, and before passage of the 

 Antiquities Act of June 8, 1906, Wetherill erected his several home- 

 stead buildings and, in part at least, roofed them with ancient tim- 

 bers from Pueblo Bonito. 



In 1877, with particular reference to Pueblo Bonito, Jackson 

 (1878, p. 441) wrote "many of the vigas, which are in excellent 

 preservation, still retain their places and protect a number of rooms 

 on the first floor." If not before, then shortly after Jackson's visit 

 every room with ceiling intact had been discovered and appropriated 

 by transient whites. The Hyde Expeditions utilized Room 146 and 

 those nearby ; Wetherill later repaired for his own use Rooms 25, 105, 

 119, and others adjacent to his residence. Room 295, which we 

 cleared, is not readily accessible but it had been entered, perhaps from 

 Room 88. Tin cans and broken glass strewed the floor ; a large hole 

 had been broken through the southwest wall and nails driven into 

 its door lintel. Sometime later all beams and ceiUng poles had been 

 severed with steel ax or saw. 



Pueblo Bonito was an empty shell when the National Geographic 

 Society began its explorations and it was the desire of the Society's 

 Committee on Research to preserve it as such, a monument to its 

 prehistoric builders. Toward this end we employed each season one 

 or more crews to repair previous damage as our investigations ad- 

 vanced (pi. 9, left). In this repair work, partly listed in Appendix C, 

 we used only sandstone and mud — materials the Bonitians had used — 

 and, where needed, ax-hewn timbers trucked in from Smith's Lake, 

 50 miles to the south. The old beam and ceiling-pole fragments we 

 introduced during these wall repairs do not, of course, date the 

 original masonry. 



The cement capping about Kivas C and D (pi. 45, lower), erro- 

 neously attributed to the National Geographic Society in Park Service 

 literature of the period, was actually an experiment in drainage 



