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Show 5 - poeblos of to- day, there are underground rooms, mostly circular, used as council- chambers as well as for the performance of the mysterious rites of their religion. Similar chambers occur, according to Lieutenant Simpson, mail the ruined cities of New Mexico, but having single walls of no great height or thickness. It is stated by Squier and Davis* that in Mexico the sacred inclosures were also used for defensive purposes, and it certainly seems probable that these curious structures served the double purpose of temples and fortifications, and that the apartments between the walls were the cells of the priesthood or the receptacles of sacred or valuable property. The smaller single- walled towers, which are scattered at intervals along the river- courses and canons, frequently in commanding situations, were probably watch or signal towers. The cave- dwellings are made by digging irregular cavities in the faces of blnffs and cliffs formed of friable rock, and then walling up the front, leaving only a small doorway for entrance and an occasional small window at the side or top. The cliff- houses conform in shape to the floor of the niche or shelf on which they are built They are of firm neat masonry, and the manner in which they are attached or cemented to the cliffs is simply marvelous. Their construction has cost a great deal of labor, the rock and mortar of which they are built having been brought for hundreds of feet up the most precipitous places. They have a much more modern look than the valley and cave remains, and are probably in general more recent, belonging rather to the close than to the earlier parte of a long period of occupation. Their position, however, has secured them in a great measure from the hand of the invader as well as from the ordinary effects of age. Of works of art other than architectural that might assist in throwing light upon the grade of civilization reached by these people, but meager discoveries were made; although I imagine that careful search and well- conducted exhumation might develop many things of great interest. A small number of arrow- heads, stone- implements, ornaments, and articles of fictile manufacture, that may fairly be attributed to the age of the cliff builders, were collected. The greater part of these are figured in plates XIII and XIV. There are no evidences whatever that metals were used. Numerous hieroglyphics were observed, both engraved and painted upon the cliffs. Drawings of a large number were made, and some of the more notable examples are given in plates XI and XII. A great number of burial- places were noted, but of the graves examined few yielded farther evidences of occupation than small quantities of charcoal and bits of painted pottery. These burial- places, * hich are in a number of cases covered by a heavy growth of full-grown pinon pines and cedars, are usually'found on the summits of high ridges and promontories, and are still marked by slabs of sandstone set on edge and arranged in circles, and parallelograms of greatly-crying dimensions. But that they did not always bury their dead in » igh places is proven by the frequent discovery of human remains in fc arroyos or deep washes in the valleys. Three skeletons were ob-ttned, in the vicinity of ruined villages, from the sides of recent washes. The accompanying plates are, with one exception, reproductions of pen- drawings, and are arranged for convenience, rather than from any jjfcthod of classification. The plans are not drawn to a uniform scale, teeause of the inconvenience of such an arrangement; but measure. * Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, page 102. |