Through a large area in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, also in
parts of northern Mexico, there are found several kinds of ancient ruins.
At some places they are pretty well preserved, and walls still stand to a
considerable height. At others they are mere heaps of stone blocks or
crumbling adobe bricks. The three best defined types of buildings found in
these ruins are old pueblos, cliff ruins, and cave houses.
Zuñi is the largest inhabited pueblo. Not far from it lies Old Zuñi; and
under the ruins of Old Zuñi lie the ruins of a yet older pueblo. Such
ruins of old pueblos number hundreds in the Southwest. Sometimes the old
walls were built of stone, carefully laid, and with the cracks neatly
chinked with splinters of stone; sometimes the stones of the walls were
laid in adobe cement; sometimes the walls were constructed of great adobe
bricks. These old pueblos were in style and character like those now
inhabited. They were often three or four stories high and terraced from in
front back. Sometimes they were elliptical or rounded in general form, but
more commonly they were built around the three sides of a central court,
upon which the buildings faced. Some of these old pueblos were larger than
any now occupied, and many of them were better built.
The cliff dwellings were built on ledges of rock along the sides of
cliffs. Many of the streams of the Southwest flow through deep and narrow
gorges cut in the solid rock. Such gorges are there called cañons. Among
the famous cliff-dwellings are those in the cañon of the Chelley River,
and those in Mancos Cañon. Here are houses perched up on ledges or stowed
away in natural caverns. Some of them are hundreds of feet above the
stream, and have a perpendicular rock wall for one hundred feet below
them. These houses are carefully built with stone laid in cement. Besides
houses of many rooms, and of two or more stories, there are circular
towers. Plainly, the people who built these houses did it to secure
themselves from attack. Their gardens and fields must have been far below
in the valley.
[Illustration.]