In reports on the excavation of Far View House[11] on the Mesa Verde,
the author called attention to clusters of mounds indicating ruined
buildings in the neighborhood of Mummy Lake, a little more than 4 miles
from Spruce-tree House. This cluster he considers a village; Far View
House, excavated from one of the mounds, is regarded as a prehistoric
pueblo of the pure type. The forms of other buildings covered by the
remaining mounds of the Mummy Lake site are unknown, but it is probable
that they will be found to resemble Far View House, or that all members
of the village have similar forms.
[11] A Prehistoric Mesa Verde Pueblo and its People. Smithson. Rept.
for 1916, pp. 461-488, 1917. Far View House—a Pure Type of Pueblo Ruin.
Art and Archaeology, vol. vi, no. 3, 1917.
This grouping of small pueblos into villages at Mummy Lake on the Mesa
Verde is also a distinctive feature of ruins in the Montezuma Valley
and McElmo district. In these villages one or more of the component
houses may be larger and more conspicuous, dominating all the others,
as at Goodman Point, or at Aztec Spring. The houses composing the
village at Mud Spring were about the same size, but at Wolley Ranch
Ruin only one mound remains, evidently the largest, the smaller having
disappeared.
The third group, towers and great houses, includes buildings of oval,
circular, semicircular, and rectangular shapes. Morphologically
speaking, they do not present structural features of pueblos, for they
are not terraced, neither have they specialized circular ceremonial
rooms, kivas with vaulted roofs surrounded by rectangular rooms,
or other essential features of the pueblo type. The group contains
buildings which are sometimes consolidated with cliff-houses and
pueblos, but are often independent of them. In this type are included
castellated buildings in the Mancos, Yellow Jacket, McElmo, and the
numerous northern tributary canyons of the San Juan.