Vases from the Colorado Chiquito.
The cut from Whipple shows two vases found here, restored from fragments. This is one of the rarest kinds of pottery found in the region, and is said by Whipple not to be manufactured by any North American Indians of modern times. It is seldom colored, the ornamentation being raised or indented, somewhat like that on molded glassware, and of excellent workmanship. The material is light-colored and porous, and the vases are not glazed. The ordinary fragments of earthen ware found on this river will be represented in another part of this chapter. Some very rude and simple rock-inscriptions were noticed, and a newspaper writer states that the names of Jesuit priests who visited the place in the sixteenth century are inscribed on the rocks. Some additional and not very well-founded reports of antiquities are given in a note.[XI-39]
REMAINS ON THE COLORADO CHIQUITO.
At a bend in the river, about forty miles above the ruins last mentioned, are the remains of a rectangular stone building, measuring one hundred and twenty by three hundred and sixty feet, and standing on an isolated sandstone hill. The walls are mostly fallen, but some of the standing portions are ten feet thick, and seem to contain small apartments. Many pine timbers are scattered about in good preservation, and two posts twelve feet in height still remain standing.[XI-40]
Some twenty-five miles still farther up the Rio Puerco flows into the Colorado Chiquito from the north-east, and at the junction of the two streams Möllhausen noticed some remains which he does not describe.[XI-41] Twelve miles up the Puerco valley, on the banks of a small tributary, called Lithodendron Creek, were scattered fragments of pottery, and remains of stone houses, one of the walls extending several feet below the present surface of the ground. Still farther up the Puerco and five miles south of the river, at Navajo Spring, scattered pottery and arrow-heads are the only remaining trace of an aboriginal settlement, no walls being visible. On a neighboring hill, however, was noticed a circular depression in the earth forty paces in diameter. The cut from Möllhausen represents some of the aboriginal inscriptions on Puerco River.[XI-42]
Rock-Inscriptions on Rio Puerco.
REMAINS ON THE RIO ZUÑI.