Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/767

Rh On turning to the fourth volume of Hubert H. Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States, which is devoted to the study of antiquities, I was surprised to find that the extensive ruins of the Verde were at that time (1875) undescribed and unknown, save through vague accounts received from Mr. Leroux and other guides and trappers. On page 636 we read: "These ruins are not very far from Prescott in the north and Fort McDowell in the south; and I regret not having been able to obtain from officers in the Arizona service the information which they must have acquired respecting those remains, if they actually exist, during the past ten or fifteen years." Some of these ruins have since been examined by archæologists accompanying Government surveying parties, and models of several of them are to be seen in eastern museums; but no exhaustive account of them has ever been written, nor have any been more than superficially explored.

The writer has availed himself of the opportunity afforded by numerous tours of field-service and authorized hunting expeditions, amounting in the aggregate to several thousand miles of travel, to examine most of the principal ruins in the territory, from the famous Casa Grande of the Gila itself to the smaller casas and caves on the head-waters of its tributaries. Although highly diverse in form, style, material, and location, it is evident that these buildings belonged to a single race. This is shown by the similarity of products and identity of habits, as well as by the relation of the dwellings to each other. The implements and pottery found in the rude caves of the Upper Verde are identical with those which Mr. Cushing has recently obtained from the immense casas grandes of Salt River. In all, the food substances and mode of agriculture are essentially the same. Again, the proudest casas grandes are built on the summits of cliffs whose sides are honeycombed with cave-dwellings, thus combining in a single community the most diverse styles of habitations.

Only the aboriginal monuments of the Verde region will here receive attention. They are uniform with those of the rest of the Gila Basin. In fact, little violence would be done by uniting all of our southwestern ruins with those of the northern tier of Mexican States into a single group. They were the work of substantially the same people.

The accompanying map indicates the location of only such remains as are personally known to the writer. Detailed descriptions of all of them would prove tedious to the reader and exceed our present limits.

The walled buildings are of two kinds—those occupying natural hollows or cavities in the faces of cliffs, and those built in exposed situations. The former, whose walls are protected by sheltering cliffs, are sometimes found in almost as perfect a state of