58 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I47 



The Old Bonitians were a stubborn people and especially so in 

 their stonework. It never changed. Wherever found throughout the 

 pueblo, irrespective of surroundings and irrespective of depth, Old 

 Bonitian stonework remained the same — single-coursed, wall- wide 

 slabs of sandstone bedded in a near-surplus of adobe mud. 



In its crescentic arrangement Old Bonito is a haphazard agglomera- 

 tion of large and small rooms added one by one as the need arose. 

 But there is none that, from available data, can be recognized as the 

 point of beginning. If a nucleus is to be found anywhere about the 

 village it lies among the cluster of relatively small, crowded structures 

 at the top of the crescent since larger rooms curve east and west. The 

 quantity and diversity of ceremonial paraphernalia stored in some of 

 those small rooms suggest an importance in the community quite out 

 of proportion to their size. And four of them had come eventually 

 to be used for burials — priesthood burials if one may judge from the 

 wealth of accompanying ornaments. 



Wherever we bared it the exterior rear wall of Old Bonito was 

 double-thick at the bottom and sloped toward the ceiling. It had 

 no door. Outside rooms, set aside for storage, were entered from 

 the living rooms and these latter were entered through the concave 

 front wall or through hatchways. Those we excavated, Rooms 296, 

 298, 317-330, were relatively straight-sided within, repeatedly 

 plastered, and as often smoke stained. Large and small, there was a 

 feeling of austerity about them, an emptiness that would have been 

 less apparent, naturally, had we found more evidence of domestic 

 life — kitchen utensils, mealing stones in place, poles or pegs for 

 suspended blankets, agricultural tools, and implements of the crafts- 

 man. 



THE HOUSES OF OLD BONITO 



Irrespective of size. Old Bonitian rooms were floored with tram- 

 pled mud and ceiled with whatever materials were near at hand. 

 Cottonwood, pine, pinyon, or juniper logs — their ends gnawed beaver- 

 like with stone axes — appear to have been utilized indiscriminately; 

 brush of one sort or another was employed over the logs in Rooms 1, 

 3a, 3b, 28, 35a, 56, 320, 323, 327, and 330 ; reeds or grass are reported 

 from at least 2 ceilings, in Rooms 3d and 85 ; cornstalks were in- 

 cluded in the ceiling of Room 85. Weak beams and those shallowly 

 seated in wall masonry necessitated supporting posts. Nearly every 

 Old Bonitian room, no matter how small, had one or more ceiling 

 props. 



