Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/298

 286 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

identification: the wooden object in pi. 47, described as the plunger of a fire-making apparatus is in reality the wooden foreshaft of a reed arrow, as are the two other specimens figured in pi. 44, g, g r. Dr. Fewkes in his report on Sprucetree House (Bull. 41, B. A. E., fig. 20) has also misidenti- fied a similar foreshaft by calling it a "wooden needle."

The particular interest of the report lies in Part II, "Ruins on the Mesa." The admirably presented data may be very briefly summarized as follows: the sites lie on the crests of ridges; they consist of small, irregularly rectangular rooms placed side by side in single or double rows or in hollow rectangles; the long axes of all the groups run east and west. The bottoms of the rooms were sunk into the ground to a depth of from a few inches to two feet. The hard earth sides of these excavations were sometimes merely plastered, sometimes reinforced by lining them with upright stone slabs; in other cases shallow trenches were dug about the sides of the rooms and double rows of small slabs set into them as wedges to hold upright poles. Although these foundations vary somewhat in detail, the superstructures all seem to have been the same: thin walls of vertical poles, wattled together with osiers and daubed with adobe; the roofs supported by stout posts set at the corners of the rooms. There was never more than a single story. While no kivas appear, there are in the neighborhood of some of the villages depressions which are probably the remains of such circular subterranean rooms as were observed by Mr. Morris 70 miles further east; the latter had central firepits, but none of the other typical attributes of kivas. To the south of the buildings in each case there lay a refuse and burial mound; the bodies were placed flexed in shallow pits, and were accompanied by mortuary offerings of pottery. All the skulls from the graves on the plateau exhibited occipital deformation; those from two apparently similar, though unexcavated, sites (Long Hollow, nos. 22 and 23) in the valley of the La Plata were all undeformed.

The stone and bone artifacts from these "pole-and-mud" villages do not differ greatly from parallel types found in the cliff-houses; the manos and metates (fig. 6), however, seem to the reviewers to be of a less specialized type than those of the cliff-houses. The potjtery, on the other hand, is unmistakably different in technique, form and ornamen- tation from that of the Mesa Verde cliff ruins and the large Aztec pueblo. The ware is coarse, much of it undecorated; the bowls have thinned rims (not square-edged as on the Mesa Verde), and a number of peculiar gourd-shaped vessels appear. The decorations of the painted ware are bold and free (especially on the pieces from Long Hollow) and show little of the conventional geometricism of late Mesa Verde ornamentation.

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