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Updated: June 9, 2025
On the face of the cliff, hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet or even miles in length, they dug out chambers with stone tools, these chambers being little rooms eight or ten feet in diameter. Sometimes two or more such chambers connected. Then they constructed stairways in the soft rock, by which their cavate houses were reached; and in these rock shelters they lived during times of war.
The valley below, especially to the southward, was probably occupied by their gardens. In the chambers among the overhanging cliffs a great many interesting relics were found, of stone, bone, and wood, and many potsherds. Rep. Bur. It will be seen that the first group described bears a remarkably close resemblance to the cavate lodges on the Rio Verde.
Cavate dwellings similar to those here described are reported to exist in the canyons of upper Salado, Gala, and Zuñi rivers, and we may with reason suspect that the distribution of cavate dwellings is as wide as that of the pueblos themselves, the sole requisite being a soft tufaceous rock, capable of being easily worked by people with stone implements.
To this latter type belong a number of cavate lodges on the northern side of Clear creek, about 4 miles above its mouth. The cavate lodges of the Verde differ in some particulars from those found in other regions; they are not excavated in tufa or volcanic ash, nor are the fronts of the chambers generally walled up. Front walls are found here, but they are the exception and not the rule.
The cavate lodges seem to have been excavated without the aid of other tools than a rough maul or a piece of stone held in the hand, and such a tool is well adapted to the work, since a blow on the surface of the rock is sufficient to bring off large slabs.
This is true more especially of the villages of the plains and mesa tops, for neither cave-houses nor cavate dwellings are found in the immediate vicinity of the inhabited Tusayan pueblos.
When the Navajo invasion was long past, civilized men as Spanish adventurers entered this country from Mexico, and again the Tewan peoples left their homes on the mesas and by the canyons to find safety in the cavate dwellings of the cliffs; and now the archaeologist in the study of this country discovers these two periods of construction and occupation of the cavate dwellings of the Tewan Indians.
A general view of the ruin on the northern promontory is given in plate XXVII, and the same illustration shows the remains of the other village on the flat top of the promontory in the farther part of the foreground. The cavate lodges are generally rudely circular in shape, sometimes oblong, but never rectangular.
Here, however, the cavate lodge is the feature which has been most developed, and it is noteworthy that the village ruins that occur in connection with them are small and unimportant and occupy a subordinate position.
The best examples are found some 8 miles south of Verde, in a small canyon on the eastern side of the river, and it is noteworthy that in this case stone villages occur in conjunction with and subordinate to the cavate lodges, while elsewhere within this region and in other regions the cavate lodges are found either alone or in conjunction with and subordinate to stone villages.
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