PUEBLO RUINS NEAR WINSLOW, ARIZONA. 523 



in the mounds. These excavations showed that the majority of the 

 rooms were large, that their walls were nicely plastered, and that they 

 were two stories high in some places. In more than one part of the 

 ruin we came upon well preserved cedar beams of flooring several feet 

 below the surface. Fireplaces (?) and windows were found, but only 

 rarely, although passages from one chamber to another were common. 

 In one of the rooms we found a human skeleton, apparently of an old 

 man, but with no evidences of careful burial. The skull of an infant 

 lay on the floor of another room. It was interesting likewise to note 

 that in the large flat slabs on the floor of one of the larger chambers 

 we found small round holes, carefully made, which suggested the 

 sipapu, or symbolic opening, the orifice through which, it is held, races 

 originally emerged from the underworld. As this is one of the features 

 in the kiva floors at Tusayan, we might readily consider the chamber in 

 question to have been a sacred room or kiva; but later in our excava- 

 tions we found many similar slabs of perforated stone near graves 

 in the necropolis, which suggests that possibly these stones were used 

 in the floors of rooms to cover the dead in intramural interments. 



The great collections of prehistoric objects which were taken at 

 Homolobi came from the necropolis, or burial place, which is always the 

 most wonderful in its revelation of the character of ancient life. The 

 cemeteries of Homolobi were situated, just outside the town, in the slope 

 of the mound, only a few feet from the outer wall. The dead were thus 

 practically interred in the very shade of the pueblo, and were not car- 

 ried to any distance. There was nothing superficially visible to indicate 

 these interments, save now and then the edge of a flagstone placed 

 upright in the soil. The custom of intramural burial and interment just 

 outside the house walls seems to have been of very ancient date; the 

 transportation of the deceased to a distance, more modern. Pueblos, 

 like Awatobi and Old Ounopavi, which were under Spanish influence, 

 practiced both methods, but the inhabitants of the present inhabited or 

 modern Tusayan pueblos long ago abandoned burials in their villages, 

 and now carry their dead down the mesa, or some distance from the town. 

 At Sikyatki the cemeteries were a few hundred feet distant from the 

 pueblo, while at Homolobi, Chevlon, and Chaves Pass the dead were 

 buried in the town, or close outside the walls. I found no evidence of 

 cremation of the dead. 1 Almost every grave was indicated by a flat 

 stone slab, which stood upright or lay above a skeleton. Some of these 

 stones were perforated with round, oval, or square holes. There was 

 no uniformity in the orientation or positions of the dead, for some of 

 the bodies were extended, others had knees drawn to the breast, and 

 still others were lying on one side. Double and multiple burials were 



1 Although it is distinctly stated by early Spanish writers that the Cibolans burned 

 their dead, the finding of skeletons in ancient Zuiii ruins shows that the ancient 

 Zunians did not always cremate. The great numbers of skeletons found in and about 

 the ruins of the Little Colorado indicates that burial in the ground was a general 

 custom. 



