Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/702

672 of the fingers of the builders, showing even the fine lines of the texture of the skin, and in one or more places the impress of a complete hand. Their hands appear to have been smaller than the average. Indeed, everything tends to show that this was a race of small stature.

To gain access to these elevated abodes, the people made use of ladders, and of niches which they cut in the rocks.

The amount of labor involved in the construction of these towns was, for a people so absolutely dependent on their own unaided labor, enormous. In some of the cliff-houses, the stones had to be carried for hundreds of feet, up precipitous walls, where the only footing was by holes which they had cut in the rock. All the stone used in the enormous buildings at Aztec Spring was brought from the foot of a cliff fully a mile away, and this without the aid of beasts of burden.

Fragments of pottery are found everywhere. Indeed, it is slight exaggeration to say that the plateaus are paved with them. One may ride for miles with the constant accompaniment of the ring of the horse's hoof against the relics of the ancients. The amount of pottery which this people used was enormous. It would seem that careless servants are not among the innovations of the nineteenth century. Few whole vessels have been found; few, even, of large fragments. These vessels are variously ornamented. The surfaces of some are corrugated, apparently with the thumb-nail; on some, raised figures are seen; others, and these are by far the most abundant, are glazed, and covered with all conceivable figures, rudely painted.

The pottery resembles very much that made by the Moquis and other similar people to-day, but is in many respects superior to it. Arrow-heads seem to have been another staple article of manufacture, judging from the abundance of the specimens. They are made of varieties of quartz; and beautiful specimens, made of smoky quartz, chalcedony, moss agate, and opal, have been found.

The cemeteries which have been examined present a family resemblance. The graves, or family lots they may be, are surrounded by flat stones, set on edge in the earth. The little lots thus marked out are rectangular in shape, with sides six to ten feet in length. Several of these were opened, but nothing was found except a little charcoal.

With regard to the age of these ruins, and the date of the occupation of this country by these people, little has yet been learned. The erosion of cliffs in the neighborhood of the cliff-houses gives no satisfactory data on which to found an estimate. The cemeteries and some of the ruins are overgrown by large pines and cedars, some of them a foot or more in diameter. The Moquis and Pueblos have no traditions concerning these people, who were undoubtedly their ancestors. But neither of these facts gives more than the very general idea that the date of their occupation of the country was several centuries ago.

The ruins are, in many cases, found several miles from the nearest water—a fact which shows conclusively that at the time when these