Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/782

762 had a capacity of about thirty gallons. Some of the smaller pieces were unbroken, and, although unglazed, were smoothly finished and decorated in colored patterns with rare taste. There were ladles or dippers, shallow saucers, graceful ollas, and vases displaying much artistic feeling in their conception and execution. One room appeared to have served as a store-room for earthenware utensils, some of which were found in nests, contained one within another, the smaller specimen measuring but one and one fourth inches in diameter. A few perforated discs of pottery, resembling wooden ones from cliff and cave dwellings, were noted.

Numerous tools of bone, chiefly such as were employed in the manufacture of ropes, neatly carved from the bones of deer or antelope, were among the relics found. Various food substances were examined, including bones, teeth, or horns (usually charred by fire) of elk, mule-deer, antelope, beaver, spermophile, pouched gopher, wood-rat, muskrat, mice, cotton-tail and jack-rabbit, turkey, serpent, turtle, and fish. A sandal of yucca, differing in design from that taken from the wall of Montezuma's Castle, and several pieces of human scalps, complete the list of relics from this casa.

There are many ruins of the class just described in the Verde region, as indicated on the accompanying map. Among them are several conspicuously perched on the summits of high, isolated, flat-topped buttes on the Rio Verde and on Oak, Beaver, and other tributary creeks; others are built on the precipitous edges of table-lands bordering canons in which streams flow; while some occupy lower positions in the valleys. It would appear, from the location of some of these casas grandes, that the water supply has diminished or otherwise greatly altered since they were occupied, as there is now no water to be found within several miles of them. Cisterns were doubtless utilized, but must have proved inadequate to supply the needs of so large a population.

These pueblos frequently inclosed an open square or court. There is such a one on Oak Creek, built on a bluff butte, level on the top, which is one hundred and twenty-five feet above the surrounding mesa. The building is subrectangular in shape, conforming to that of the summit of the butte, the sides of which are precipitous. Other villages, perhaps less prosperous on account of their inferior advantages for agriculture, are to be seen in many localities, which were evidently but one story high. Such is the case with a pueblo built on the point of a mesa east of the Lower Verde settlement.

Furnaces, probably used for firing pottery, were discovered in some of these ruins. There is a very perfectly preserved one in a ruin on the right bank of Oak Creek, close to its junction with the Verde River, having walls standing to the height of fifteen to twenty feet.