Major Antiquities
Under this term are embraced those immovable objects as walls of houses and their various structural parts—floors, roofs, and fireplaces. These features must of necessity be protected in place and left where they were constructed. Minor antiquities, as implements of various kinds, stone objects, pottery, textiles, and the like, can best be removed and preserved in a museum, where they can be seen to greater advantage and by a much larger number of people. The ideal way would be to preserve both major and minor antiquities together in the same neighborhood, or to install the latter in the places in which they were found. While at present such an arrangement at Spruce-tree House and Cliff Palace is not practicable, large specimens, as metates and those jars that are embedded in the walls, have, as a rule, been left as they were found.
As the repair work at Cliff Palace was limited to the protection of the major antiquities, the smaller objects for the greater part having been removed before our work began, this report deals more especially with the former, the whole ruin being regarded as a great specimen to be preserved in situ.
Very little attention was given to labeling rooms, kivas, and their different parts, the feeling being that this experiment has been sufficiently well carried out at Spruce-tree House, an examination of which would logically precede that of Cliff Palace. Spruce-tree House has been made a "type ruin" from which the tourist can gain his first impression of the major antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park, and while it was well to indicate on its walls the different features characteristic of these buildings, it would be redundant to carry out the same plan in the other ruins.[21]
No attempt was made to restore the roof of any of the Cliff Palace kivas for the reason that one can gain a good idea of how the roof of a circular kiva is constructed from its restoration in Kiva C of Spruce-tree House, and an effort to roof a kiva of Cliff Palace would merely duplicate what has already been accomplished without adding essentially to our knowledge.