Antiquities of the Mesa Verde national park, Sprucetree House / by Jesse Walter Fewkes.

  • Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 1850-1930.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Antiquities of the Mesa Verde national park, Sprucetree House / by Jesse Walter Fewkes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ledges somewhat higher there are small granaries each with a hole in the side, probably for the storage of corn. It will be noticed that the terraced form of buildings, almost uni- versal in modern three-story pueblos and common in pictures of ruins south of the San Juan, does not exist in Spruce-tree House. The front of the three tiers of rooms 22, 23, as shown in plate 3, is vertical, not terraced from foundation to top. Whether the walls of rooms now in ruins were terraced or not can not be determined, for these have been washed out and have fallen to so great an extent that it is almost impossible to tell their original form. Rooms 25-28, for instance, might have been terraced on the front side, but it is more reasonable to suppose they were not; ° from the arrangement of doors it would seem that there was a lateral entrance on the ground floor rather than through roofs. Balconies Balconies attached to the walls of buildings below rows of doors occurred at several places. On no other hypothesis than the presence of these structures can be explained the elevated situation of entrances opening into the rooms immediately above rooms 20, 21, 22. In fact, there appear to have been two balconies at this place, one above the other, but all now left of them is the projecting floor-beams, and a fragment of a floor on the projections at the north end of the lower one, in front of room 20. These balconies (pi. 3) were apparently constructed in the same way as the structure that gives the name to the ruin called Balcony House; they seem to have been used by the inhabitants as a means of communication between neighboring rooms. Noidenskiolcl writes:6 The second story is furnished along the wall just mentioned, with a balcony; the joists between the two stories project a couple of feet, long poles lie across them parallel to the walls, the poles are covered with a layer of cedar bast, and, finally with dried clay. a Nordenskiold on the contrary seems to make the terraced rooms one of the points of resemblance between the cliff-dwellings and the great ruins of the Chaco. He writes : “ On comparison of the ruins in Chaco Canon with the cliff-dwellings of Mancos, we And several points of resemblance. In both localities the villages are fortified against attack, in the tragt of Mancos by their site in inaccessible precipices, in Chaco Canon by a high outer wall in which no doorways were constructed to afford entrance to an enemy. Behind this outer wall the rooms descended in terraces towards the inner court. One side of this court was protected by a lower semicircular wall. In the details of the buildings we can find several features common to both. The roofs between the stories were constructed in the same way. The doorways were built of about the same dimensions. The rafters were often allowed to project beyond the outer wall as a foundation for a sort of balcony (Balcony House, fhe Pueblo Chettro Kettle). The estufa at Hungo Pavie with its six quadrangular pillars of stone is exactly similar to a Mesa Verde estufa (see p. 16). The pottery strewn in fragments everywhere in Chaco Canon resembles that found on the Mesa Verde. We are thus not without grounds for assuming that it was the same people, at different stages of its development, that inhabitated these two regions.”—The Cliff Dwell- ers of the Mesa Verde, p. 127. 6 Ibid., p. 67.