30 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I47 



storerooms stood at the rear, behind the dwellings but connected with 

 them. On the earthen floor of remodeled Room 92, which is the 

 second story of 3a (elsewhere described as Room 97), Pepper (ibid., 

 p. 298) found "a great deal of corn . . . bean bushes . . . still 

 green . . . and beans in the pod." These freshly harvested crops 

 may have been piled there temporarily, pending transfer to more 

 secure storage. Burned corn-on-the-cob and pinyon nuts were noted 

 in Room 5, a ground-floor storeroom. Stone-walled bins are described 

 in Room 85, some fitted with slab doors and built one upon another. 



Late Bonitian housewives preferred jar-shaped storage facilities 

 in out-of-way places. Four outworn Corrugated-coil pots, one of 

 them containing a quantity of unidentifiable grass seed, had been 

 concealed under the floor of Late Bonitian Room 128, The five 

 Banded-neck cook pots buried to the rim beneath the floor of Old 

 Bonitian Room 323 were Old Bonitian and may have been placed 

 there in imitation of a contemporary Late Bonitian practice (Judd, 

 1954, pis. 50-51). 



Subfloor jar-shaped pits also served for Late Bonitian storage. 

 We found five of them, averaging 42 inches in maximum diameter 

 by 54 inches deep under the floor of Room 266, each rimmed to re- 

 ceive a discoidal sandstone slab at floor level. The five had been dug 

 into clayey sand so compact there was no need for a plaster lining. 

 Similar but smaller pits were exposed under Rooms 282 and 294 

 and still another, 46 inches in diameter by 50 inches deep, was noted 

 outside Room 177. 



Milling rooms. — So far as we know, only two among the 300-odd 

 ground floor rooms in Pueblo Bonito, 90 and 291, were equipped with 

 binned metates for grinding the daily ration of maize. Both were 

 Late Bonitian rooms and both had been stripped of their mills and 

 bin slabs at the time of abandonment or before. We observed no 

 trace of a milling bin in first-story Old Bonitian rooms and Pepper 

 mentions none. Obviously the housewives of Pueblo Bonito kept 

 and used their metates in second- and third-story living rooms. 



All Pueblo Bonito metates are of sandstone, troughed, and open 

 at one end. None has an over-all grinding surface such as that from 

 Room 5, Pueblo del Arroyo (Judd, 1959, p. 106). Mills of the Old 

 Bonitians, to judge from Pepper's observations and our own, are 

 broad, thin, and shallow-grooved — more deliberately trimmed, per- 

 haps, but otherwise comparable to the tabular metates of Chaco 

 Canyon BM. Ill and P. I. peoples (Roberts, 1929, p. 132; Judd, 



