In the left foreground an unmarried girl with butterfly hair-do is husking corn of several colors and gossiping with a married lady who has the matron’s two rolls of hair behind her ears. Three women in the painting wear the pueblo dress, while the others have string aprons; both would have been used in the summer. Nearby is a ladle and a corrugated pot—on the wall top a Classic Mesa Verde mug and a decorated jar.
Between the girl and the wife fixing her husband’s hair lies a snare. Close to the couple are a bowl, a squash, a stone axe, and a peculiar submarine-shaped jar.
Above the couple a dog barks at a youngster who has broken a big jar. Two women are making pottery; behind them two women replaster the lower room of a two-story house, on top of which a man is pointing out to some children that the town crier is making an announcement, and they should keep quiet. Two priests, one with ceremonial kilt and evergreens, climb a one-pole ladder.
Beneath the crier a woman closes the doorway of her house with a stone slab, and below her on the near roof an old lady keeps warm with a rabbit-skin blanket, while her daughter grinds corn. In front of the house a woman, whose baby snoozes in a wooden cradle, bakes blue corn meal “pancakes” on a hot stone slab. The kiva door is closed with a mat, turkeys wander about, and the woman in the right-hand corner, sitting on the beautiful brown textile (to be seen in the Park Museum), strings turquoise beads.
To the right, two bow-and-arrow-makers ridicule a returning unsuccessful hunter, women bring water in jars from the spring, and turkeys pick over the trash pile.
Visible in the painting are a round and a square tower, ten of 23 exceptionally small kivas which occur in the ruin, and rectangular and T-doors. Beyond the square tower with its balcony, people are finishing a third-story room.
Cliff Palace had 200 living rooms and sheltered perhaps 400 persons.
MORFIELD VILLAGE AND CAMPGROUND