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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 72 



exceptional construction. Two of these, now in the museum of the 

 Brooklyn Institute, were found in a cliff dwelling in the Chelly 

 Canyon, which seems to indicate that there formerly existed among 

 the cliiT dwellers of that canyon a fire priesthood like the Hopi Yaya. 

 As the clifif dwellers of Chelly Canyon and those of the Mesa V^erde 

 were closely related it is a fair conclusion that the latter also had a 

 well-developed New Fire Cult, and possibly a Yaya priesthood. 



The masonry of Fire Temple points to an early epoch in the evolu- 

 tion of the Mesa Verde culture, possibly one contemporary with the 



Fig. ioi. — Western end of Fire Temple Court. Photograph by G. L. Beam. 

 Courtesy of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. 



first settlement in Cliff Palace cave, but anterior to the erection of the 

 unfinished Sun Temple, which marks a later or culminating phase of 

 cliff house development. Architectural features that Fire Temple 

 shares with Sun Temple may be interpreted by the close relationship 

 of fire and sun cults among the cliff dwellers. Earth Lodge A, exca- 

 vated in 1 919, is the ancient type in the evolution of buildings on the 

 mesa antedating stone walls, and there are evidences of successive 

 stages illustrating cultural epochs from the crude Earth Lodge A, 

 which the earliest colonists constructed, to those of horizontal ma- 



