Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
The domiciliary ruins of this region fall easily into three general classes, to which may be added a fourth, comprising irrigating ditches and works, the first class having two subclasses. They are as follows: Stone villages. a. Villages on bottom lands. b. Villages on defensive sites. Cavate lodges. Bowlder-marked sites. Irrigating ditches and works.
It was found that the cliff-dwellings were merely farming outlooks, and that the villages proper were almost always located on the canyon bottom. With slight modifications these conclusions may be extended over the Verde region and applied to the cavate lodges there.
Although no examples of interior wall-plastering were found in the group of cavate lodges described, such work has been found in neighboring lodges; and in this group plastered floors are quite common.
This is one of the best sites for defense seen by the writer in an experience of many years. Cavate lodges are distributed generally over the whole northern portion of the region here treated. At many points throughout this region there are outcrops of a calcareous sandstone, very soft and strongly laminated and therefore easily excavated.
Aside from the actual labor of excavation, there was but little work expended on the Verde cavate lodges. The interiors were never plastered, so far as the writer could determine.
The almost entire absence of cliff-dwellings and the great abundance of cavate lodges has already been commented on, and as the geologic formations are favorable to the latter, and unfavorable to the former on the Verde, whereas the Canyon de Chelly, where there are hundreds of cliff-dwellings and no cavate lodges, the conditions are reversed, this abundance of cavate lodges may be set down as due to an accident of environment.
When the Tusayan Indian today moves to his kisi or summer brush house shelter he practically camps in his corn or near it, in easy reach to drive away crows, or build wind-breaks to shelter the tender sprouts; but to go to their cornfields the inhabitants of the cavate dwellings I have described were forced to cross a river before the farm was reached.
Above the cliffs, on the mesas, which have already been described, evidences of more ancient ruins were found. These were pueblos built of cut stone rudely dressed. Every mesa had at least one ancient pueblo up off it, evidently far more ancient than the cavate dwellings found in the face of the cliffs.
In the cavate lodges window openings are not found; there is but one opening, the doorway, and this is of a pronounced and peculiar type. As a rule these doorways are wider at the top than at the bottom and there are no corners, the opening roughly approximating the shape of a pear with the smaller end downward.
The cavate lodges occur only in the face of the bluff along the river and in the lower parts of the two little canyons before mentioned. These canyons run back into the mesa seen in the illustration, which in turn forms part of the foothills rising into the range of mountains hemming in the Rio Verde on the east.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking