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The ordinary kivas let down into this raised terrace served smaller groups than the great kiva. In today’s Pueblo villages kivas are used as meeting places by both male and female members of curing societies, as workshops for making ritual equipment, for dance rehearsal, and as sleeping places for boys while they are receiving religious instruction.
Kivas were more numerous than great kivas—37 have been identified in Pueblo Bonito—though not all were usable at one time. The kiva on the left was razed. All the timbers were removed and the open pit was used as a refuse dump by people in nearby rooms.
An architectural trait peculiar to Chacoan kivas is the low bench with from four to ten pilasters made of juniper logs buried in the wall and extending horizontally onto the bench. The pilasters supported the butts of log stringers which encircled the kiva. The stringers held the weight of another, but smaller, circle of stringers, and that circle still another, until 12 to 14 layers of poles in ever-decreasing circles made a dome-like ceiling of cribbing. A nearly intact roof in a nearby kiva was found to have used 350 timbers in its construction.
Close to the wall the ceiling was only about three feet above the floor, but at the center of the room there was an eight to ten foot clearance. The space between the outside of the roof-dome and the wall of the kiva was filled with earth and rubble to level off a flat court even with the level you are standing on. When these kivas were all in use their presence was indicated only by ladders protruding from rectangular openings which served both as entryways and smoke holes.
sub-floor vent
The trench in the floor, once covered with slabs of stone, was an air duct. Rising heat from the fire in the round pit pulled fresh air through the duct and down a vertical shaft just outside the kiva wall to provide ventilation.
The smaller kiva on your right, as you proceed along the trail, is unusual in having four tall masonry pilasters. Rather than a cribbed roof, it probably had a flat roof of horizontal timbers to give it an even seven-foot clearance over the entire space.