II. OLD BONITO 



Old Bonito is a Pueblo II settlement built of mud and wall- 

 width slabs of sandstone. Its living rooms stand end to end in a 

 wide crescent with one or two storerooms behind each dwelling, 

 several subterranean kivas out in front of the house group, and a 

 communal trash pile beyond the kivas. The Old Bonitians built their 

 village close in the shadow of the north canyon wall, overlooking the 

 broad Chaco Valley with its fringe of conifers, cotton woods, and 

 willows. When they began construction they built the foundations for 

 their settlement over and between great blocks of sandstone previously 

 fallen from the nearby cliff and apparently without thought as to the 

 significance of those fallen blocks. And they probably were quite 

 unaware that, long before, Pueblo I families had dug two or more 

 pithouses on the same site (fig. 7). 



On the Society's groundplan of Pueblo Bonito (fig. 3) the 

 crescentic house cluster that identifies the original settlement stands 

 out conspicuously. Jackson noticed its architectural peculiarities and 

 so did Pepper, although neither recognized the unit as the home of 

 an independent element in the local population. Old Bonito was 

 planned and built by Pueblo II peoples and it remained a Pueblo II 

 village even after Pueblo III clans had surrounded it with dwellings 

 of their own. 



The stonework of Old Bonito is typically Pueblo II — wall- wide 

 sandstone slabs spalled around the edge with hammerstones and laid 

 one upon another in generous quantities of mud (pi. 10, 1). Where 

 surface mortar was noticeably thick, stone chips were pressed in to 

 hold it in place or to protect it from wind and rain. Here, too, despite 

 the intervening years, fingerprints of the builders remain for all to 

 see. 



This surface covering of close-lying chips occurred so frequently 

 on exterior Old Bonitian stonework exposed by our explorations, we 

 came to regard it as a standard Old Bonitian treatment. We found 

 it on the outside of Room 102, concealed by the double-thick wall of 

 Late Bonitian Room 94 (pi. 11, right). We found it on the exterior of 

 Old Bonitian Room 13, on both the west and east ends of Room 28 

 (pi. 17, lower) and low on the outside of Room 330. Pepper (1920, 

 pp. 317, 319) describes the same treatment on Old Bonitian masonry 

 under Rooms 100 and 101. 



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