150 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I47 



north to Station 6, a pair of rude 3-course foundations averaging only 

 8 inches high abuts 19 inches of good fourth-type masonry above its 

 own foot-high foundation (pi. 49, lower). The lateness of the pair 

 is thus established as they curve away to the south and west until 

 the north member comes to an abrupt end approximately 150 feet 

 from its beginning. Here, at Station 8, this north member is reduced 

 to a mere two courses, its base 20-odd inches below the surface. 



Beneath this 2-course foundation lie 3 feet of sandy clay contain- 

 ing conspicuous, fragmented chunks of adobe and, below that, an 

 additional 2 feet of compacted sand. In our test pit at this point, 

 7 feet 4 inches deep, neither sandstone spalls nor potsherds were 

 noted below the foundation, but sherds did occur, unidentified in 

 my notes, in the sand above. The south member of the pair ends 

 about 50 feet short of Station 8 at which point they are 25 inches 

 apart, average 16 inches wide by 10 inches high, and are covered by 

 10 inches of blown sand, as at Stations 2 and 4. 



Purely out of curiosity we cut a shallow trench alongside the 

 paired foundations below Station 4. When we found they had been 

 built upon water-laid sand and silt we abandoned the experiment in 

 favor of a second trench, dug to intersect the two about midway 

 between Stations 4 and 8. The results, which we dubbed "The Far 

 East Trench" (fig. 24), proved unexpectedly illuminating. Under- 

 neath the pair, quantitites of indurated sand and sandy adobe ex- 

 tended northward to merge with the fill of an undeniable watercourse. 

 That fill, chiefly debris of reconstruction — sandstone fragments and 

 chunks of adobe mortar from razed walls — had been carried out and 

 dumped into an unwanted channel where, in due course, all was 

 blanketed by Chaco Canyon's ever-present blown sand. 



Too late I realized our "Far East" trench should have been 

 continued to cross the long wall-like foundation for this latter 

 obviously was built to meet some definite purpose. Whether that 

 purpose was in any way related to the debris-filled channel nearby 

 or to the silt layers we encountered in every 5-foot-deep test made 

 throughout the Northeast Foundation Complex is a question that re- 

 mains unanswered. Flood waters from the rincon back of Chettro 

 Kettle formerly were discharged down valley, and our lone wall could 

 have been designed to divert such waters away from the village as 

 was, presumably, one 5 feet under the present surface and extending 

 100 feet upcanyon from Pueblo del Arroyo (Judd, 1959a, p. 120). 

 The same explanation does not, of course, apply to a similar rock wall 

 reaching eastward from Pueblo Alto. 



