NO. I ARCHITECTURE OF PUEBLO BONITO JUDD I4I 



out upon the plain. Our survey for Section C-C crossed that plain 

 and its modern arroyo and ended at the near east side of The Gap 

 but the extension added so little to figure 15 it has been omitted. 

 Thus, as originally executed, C-C profiled Chaco Canyon from one 

 cliff to the other. 



The Late Bonitians were tireless builders ! Nothing daunted them ! 

 No undertaking was too great ! Three separate times they increased 

 the size of their village and once abandoned plans that would have 

 doubled its ground area. With pine posts, crude stonework, and mud 

 they braced a detached portion of the cliff back of Pueblo Bonito 

 and thus gave it a Navaho name known today throughout the whole 

 reservation — tse bi'ya hani' d'hi (Franciscan Fathers, 1912, vol, 1, 

 p, 228), "the cliff braced up from beneath" (Judd, 1959), They dug 

 a huge pit in the West Court, 69 feet in diameter by 10^ feet deep, 

 and carries its contents, all 32,262 cubic feet of it, to dump into 

 the floodwater channel south of the pueblo and start the two refuse 

 mounds just beyond. 



When village waste had accumulated to a depth of 11 feet, ap- 

 proximately 4 feet above the mid-valley plain as it exists today, the 

 Late Bonitians built retaining walls part way around their two rubbish 

 piles and later re faced those walls with third-type masonry and raised 

 their height by added stonework. The Late Bonitians were, indeed, 

 tireless builders! 



I am not sure they built the ancient stairway back of Pueblo 

 Bonito, but it is a reasonable presumption — ^the stairway whose lower 

 steps were so eroded by water action we fitted 3-inch planking on the 

 original seatings in 1922, A comparable stairway is to be seen near 

 every other major P. Ill ruin in Chaco Canyon and broad pathways 

 lead from one to another. The Navaho refer to these pathways as 

 "roads" and my guess is no better. 



At the top of the Pueblo Bonito stairway is a wind-swept area, 

 oval and roughly 50 by 30 feet, ringed with piled stones and with three 

 5-inch deep dug basins in the middle (NGS Neg, 50596A), Hand- 

 pecked steps lead dimly toward Pueblo Alto, on the skyline. About 

 a mile to the northeast is the superb stairway Jackson sketched on 

 May 10, 1877 (Jackson, 1878, pi. 63), and which he insisted upon 

 climbing in 1925 just because he had done so 48 years earlier. 



Since 1877 a middle section has broken away but the remainder 

 survives, climbing upward from a most casual base. An instructive 

 circumstance in connection with this particular stairway is the series 

 of 8 incipient steps at upper right. Jackson indicated this series 



