JUDD— USE OF ADOBE 



condition. As found in various ruins, such tablets or rolls are similar 

 in shape but differ considerably in size and quantity of reenforcement. 



In Arizona, walls made from bricks of this type are supposedly 

 limited to the ancient dwellings in canons forming the headwaters of 

 Navaho creek, south of Navaho mountain. In southeastern Utah, 

 where they also occur in well-preserved cliff-ruins north of San Juan 

 river, adobe walls, reenforced with twigs or grass but not always 

 separable into blocks like that from West canon, were frequently 

 employed in the erection of circular storage bins and rectangular 

 rooms with rounded corners. The writer has also noted what appear 

 to have been storage chambers, constructed in part at least of adobe 

 rolls or tablets with a central core of rabbit-brush or small stems of 

 sage, in Cottonwood canon, n miles northwest of Kanab, in Kane 

 county, Utah. It is believed that this is the only instance in which 

 walls of this character have been reported west of the Rio Colorado. 



Remains of five such structures were observed in one cave in the 

 canon above named. The smallest, 3 feet 6 inches in diameter, was 

 just traceable above the loose sand covering the cave floor; the largest 

 and best-preserved measured 1 1 feet in diameter and was in excellent 

 condition. From the inside, the highest standing wall of this latter 

 room was 5 feet 10 inches. The unmutilated portions of its upper edge 

 were rounded and furnished no evidence that a roof of any kind had 

 ever rested thereon. 



The lower inside wall was formed by a row of thin sandstone 

 slabs, placed on edge. On one side two additional slabs were visible 

 where the adobe plaster had fallen away, showing that in one place 

 at least the lower wall of this circular building consisted of three 

 parallel stone tablets. Above these, the remaining wall appears to 

 have been made of adobe bricks reenforced in the manner already de- 

 scribed. On the upper edge of the wall, where some defacement had 

 taken place, this method of construction was especially apparent. 

 Small bunches of twigs had been inclosed in adobe, and the whole, 

 while still soft, had been forced down upon similar masses already 

 placed. These rolls, or bricks, seem to have been made without inten- 

 tional form — most of them were rather rounded on top and corre- 

 spondingly concave on the lower side. Handfuls of mud had been 

 used in some places, apparently to cover the exposed ends of the 

 twigs, before additional bricks were laid upon the wall. Thick clay 

 plaster was spread over the sides, binding the individual blocks to- 

 gether and slightly increasing the thickness of the wall as well as ren- 

 dering its surfaces more smooth. In several places, where exposed by 

 broken plaster, single layers of flat stones separated wide courses of 



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