Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/699

Rh of its walls, and the care displayed in dressing and laying the stone; also by the presence of a circular room, which, as will be seen hereafter, is their temple and council-house. On the La Plata there is a large agricultural settlement, very much dilapidated, which consists mainly of houses of this kind. The largest of these is one hundred by one hundred and fifty feet. These dwelling-houses seem to have been very similar to those in the pueblos of the present day. A high wall was built, inclosing a rectangular space. The house was built all around the interior of this wall, which thus became the back wall of the house. In the interior was a rectangular court, on which the house opened. There were no openings for egress or ingress through the wall; the only way to obtain admission being to climb over the wall, by a ladder, and descend in the same manner to the court. The house was divided into many rooms, and, except in a few cases, they did not connect with one another directly.

None of the ruins of these houses thus far examined are in such a condition as to enable one to determine whether they had more than one story. In the pueblos of the present day they are found of three and even four stories in height.

In the towns built in time of war, for defensive purposes, these dwellings are usually much smaller than in the former case, and could have accommodated comparatively few persons: but this is due to the circumstances of building-site solely; for everything in their history shows them to have been a gregarious people. These towns were evidently built later, and in many cases are so situated as to be much better sheltered from the elements, and naturally are found in a much better state of preservation than the former.

In every village, whose site would admit of it, these people have built one or more cylindrical towers, which seem, to have been used as council-houses or temples, or both. The walls are generally double, a tower within a tower, and, in one or two cases observed, there is a third tower. The space between them, several feet in width, is divided by radial partitions into rooms. Within the inner tower, the ground is excavated, forming an hemispherical depression. Here it has been supposed that the eternal fire was kept; and it has been suggested that the circular section of the building was intended to symbolize the sun, the object of their worship. These buildings are, in all cases, the most thoroughly constructed; their walls are thicker and of larger and better-dressed stones than in any other buildings. Structures quite similar to these are found in the pueblos of the present day, and are used for the purposes above mentioned. They are always found in agricultural towns, and in fortified towns on the summits of mesas, but in most collections of the cliff-houses and in the cave-dwellings they are of necessity absent.

Well-preserved specimens of these structures have been found on the edge of the mesa above the San Juan, a few miles from the mouth