THE CLIFF VILLAGES OF THE RED ROCK COUNTRY. 561 



The reader will notice that I accept without question the belief that 

 the so-called cliff' dwellers were not a distinct people, but that the cliff 

 houses were results of special adaptation to environment of a race who 

 sometimes excavated cavate dwellings or built houses in open plains. I 

 am sure that all these three types were built and inhabited at the same 

 time by the same people. Moreover, the reasoning is cogent, as long 

 ago suggested by others, that the existing pueblos are inhabited today 

 by descendants of the cliff' peoples, which have been no doubt somewhat 

 modified in consanguinity by intermarriage with nomadic stocks, but 

 have preserved the cliff-dweller cultus stage down to our own day in a 

 partially but not greatly modified form. But while recognizing the 

 kinship of the cliff dwellers with the modern Pueblo Indians, I can not 

 restrict this relationship to any one modern pueblo to the exclusion of 

 others. The evidences which are adduced that the cliff dwellers are 

 ancestors of Zunis can be paralleled by similar likenesses among the 

 Molds; indeed, the resemblances are even closer, since the Tusayan 

 Indians are today less modified by foreign influences than any other 

 pueblo peoples. The cultus stage of the so-called cliff dwellers is con- 

 served to our times, with modifications, by the existing pueblos; and 

 those members of the latter which are least modified stand nearest the 

 ancestral conditions, and therefore nearest the cliff' peoples. 



Perhaps the most remarkable type of aboriginal dwellings in the 

 Eio Verde Valley are the so-called cavate rooms which are found at 

 various places where the rock is soft enough to permit their construc- 

 tion. These caves have been hewn out of the solid rock, and in places 

 the cliffs are honeycombed with these habitations of aboriginal troglo- 

 dytes. The largest cluster examined was about 8 miles south of Old 

 Camp Verde, opposite Squaw Mountain, where their number is not far 

 from a hundred. Each subterranean chamber or suite of rooms bore 

 evidence of past habitation, and many objects of archaeological interest 

 were collected from their floors and the debris immediately at their 

 entrances. 



The accompanying illustration shows the external appearance of a 

 row of cave dwellings south of Camp Verde; a huge buttress of soft 

 stone of a character almost light enough to float, standing out from 

 the lofty hills which flank the left bank of the river, and riddled on each 

 side by caves, passages, and subterranean recesses. We clambered up 

 the broken talus, shown in the view, and entered the caves through 

 passages hardly high enough to admit a man of ordinary stature. Once 

 inside the cave, the excavation enlarges, and we find ourselves in a 

 roomy chamber, high enough to permit the visitor to stand upright, 

 with lateral platforms, side rooms, closets, and recesses. These were 

 living rooms, for there are fireplaces, well-plastered walls, and even the 

 holes for former pegs for clothing. An enumeration of the number of 

 rooms or cave habitations which exist at various points in the hills and 

 mesas overlooking the Verde conveys little idea of the population 

 sm 95 3G 



