The cliff dwellers at Frijoles, like their kin to the north, knew that the only safe method of living was in communities. So they erected what is known today as the “Long House.” One section of the north cliff was almost vertical and its base sloped gently down to the waters of the little river. This must have been the concentration of the cliff homes. Rooms were built side by side for over seven hundred feet. There were few cave rooms here to crawl back into and out of the weather. These people must have learned by experience how uncomfortable caves were, because they stuck to houses with stone walls and roofs of poles and brush and grass and mud. And they built these homes solid against the cliff and even carved recesses in the cliff so that the ends of the building stones would fit perfectly. Then the walls would not slip. The Long House was not very far from water—fifty yards. This was just a step for the women.
Some of the dwellers carved and painted pictures on the back walls of their houses or even in the caves which had barely enough room for three or four people to occupy. Call it writing if you like. It likely was “doodling.” They had no written language. They were forced to record what they thought and what they believed or had seen on the walls of their houses or in the designs of their pottery. Birds were the most common design. A mountain sheep was occasionally drawn, or a squirrel, or a rabbit; perhaps a bear or a [katsina]—a supernatural being. They might have tried to depict their ancestors emerging from the darkness and climbing up a high pole from the underworld of [Sipapu]. The [awanyu] or “plumed serpent” was quite common. It was the guardian spirit of springs. In one cave there was a drawing of a horse and certainly this was not an ancient drawing for the Spanish brought the horse to New Mexico. Some wandering [Tewa] could have seen the Spanish on horseback—on creatures which Indians thought devoured people. It might have been that other Tewa-speaking people from around the [pueblo] of San Juan, far to the north, described a horse by pictograph, when they hurried into the mountain homes of their kin after seeing the Spanish in 1540. Or it might have been drawn by some visitor after the evacuation of the Indians. It could even have been someone’s joke.
About a quarter-mile from the cliff dwellings, and where the [Canyon] becomes narrow, is a deep natural cave. It is eighty feet across and its opening faces the valley one hundred fifty feet above the waters of the Rito. One [prehistoric] group lived here for a time. They were certainly secluded. Hand holds were gouged from the soft cliffs with sharp pointed rocks and here in this, now called “Ceremonial Cave,” Indians built seventeen first-story rooms and several second-story rooms around the back. They excavated a [kiva] or ceremonial chamber to the front of the cave. Think of the task these Indians had when they carted water and poles and sticks and perhaps stones up the side of the cliff. Tons of rock were required to build these houses and the ceremonial chamber. This little group built their kiva twelve feet in diameter. It was a circular affair dug to a depth of nine feet and lined with a wall of stone which was plastered on the inside. The floor was of a special kind. It was hard, black and shiny. It had been polished with a smooth stone like the ones the Indian women use today to polish their black pottery. Only this floor was made of blood—animal blood. The Indians carefully saved the blood from animals which they killed and then mixed it with fine silt and soot from the fire and smeared it over their kiva floor in thin layers. When the blood coagulated the plaster hardened and then it was polished by rubbing a smooth stone over it in backward and forward motion. This must have been an important room to have had such an elaborately made floor. But kivas in prehistoric times may have been more important than they are today.
In the floor were six small holes in a straight line. While the plaster was still wet small pieces of oak or some other tough pliable wood was bent in loops and the ends of each piece were pushed down into the soft mud plaster. Then these holes, or round depressions were made around the loops leaving them exposed. These were directly below a horizontal pole suspended from the ceiling. This was a loom. By an arrangement of long straight sticks these ingenious Indians devised a method of weaving. Since it is thought that in years gone by women and children were not allowed in the [kivas] to break up the complacency of a man’s ceremony, we might suppose that some old man sat here and ran a shuttle through warp cords of cotton strung vertically from roof poles to floor loops. Here he carried on weaving of a ceremonial nature with cotton or animal hair while the smoke from a ceremonial fire in the fireplace circled around making the kiva a very unpleasant place to be despite an elaborate system of ventilation.
These “high-up” cave dwellers had their houses built like the ones at [Mesa Verde], completely sheltered by the overhanging cave roof. To the side of the dwellings, situated near the back wall of the cave, was a turkey pen of little cleanliness. When I discovered this pen hundreds of years later, the floor was covered with human feces, turkey and rodent droppings. They had all lived here in times anterior to the coming of the Spaniards—Indians, turkeys and rodents. The Indian hauled his water and food from the valley below. He secluded himself from the bulk of the Indian population at [Tyuonyi]. The question will always be, why? Of course, there was a small [pueblo] on the other side of the [Canyon] on a little knoll across the river but this might have been built, occupied and abandoned before Indians ever occupied the big cave as a place of residence.
And then, there were Indians who preferred to live on the floor of the [Canyon] in [pueblos]—terraced community apartment houses. Several hundred yards below the concentration of the cliff dwellings and in the lower end of the [Tyuonyi] they built such an apartment house. Little is known about it because it has never been excavated. Broken pieces of pottery, the most important tool of the archæologist, are found strewn over its ruins today. Its walls are down now and its rooms are almost completely filled in with debris. This particular group of Indians preferred to have their dwelling close to water and they erected it with stone and mud mortar. This is all that is known of this isolated settlement.
It is quite possible that the most popular dwelling places in Frijoles [Canyon] were the dwellings at the Long House, so well protected by the sheer vertical cliff wall. These could have been over-crowded. Indians might have cared little about living in other sections of the cliff. It might have been that some of the cliff dwellers had experienced terrible slides when hundreds of tons of loose rock and boulders came tumbling down on their little houses, crushing them like pasteboard boxes and burying the occupants alive. All the man-power in the northern part of the [Pajarito] Plateau could never have rescued their kin who might have been caught in these cave homes. Those rocks had rolled from the top to stay and there they remain today. One wonders what stories those buried caves hold—if, by chance, the skeletons of the occupants are still there. Indians perhaps have died scratching at the boulders which covered the entrances to their caves or tearing their hair and clutching their throats as they suffocated and fell extended on the hard plaster floors in their rooms. Those caves have never been opened.
It is easy to see that the valley floor could have been more popular as a dwelling place than sections of the cliff more susceptible to slides than the Long House. A part of the main population built and lived in a large terraced community apartment house known as “[Puwige]” or “[pueblo] where the women scraped the bottoms of the pottery vessels clean.” This is now the famous ruin known the world over. It has been featured in the National Geographic Magazine and many other publications.
[Puwige] never existed during the very early occupation of the [Canyon]. Its initial wall stones were not laid until the beginning of the Great Period. Any Indian family might have erected a few rooms near the little river—close to water. Then another family came along and built a few more rooms. A son took on a wife and the entire family helped to build his house, since house-building was a community proposition. Indian men went to the slopes where boulders had rolled down and broke them with heavy stones and fashioned the pieces into uneven building blocks. This was no small job. Walls were laid in mud mixed by the small brown hands of Indian women. Poles were cut and laid across the walls, then splittings and cane and brush were laid over the tops and sealed with thick coats of mud. Thick coats of crude plaster were spread over the inside of walls and over floors. These Indians had little clay, none for walls anyway, without hauling it in on their backs, so, they poured hot ashes into the mud to make it stick. Hot ashes formed a sort of lime. [Coronado], in 1540, found the Indians at [Tiguex] making a mortar and plaster in this manner. Slabs of basalt were brought in and set edgewise in the rooms as fireplaces. This was the home of the newlyweds—built right next to the groom’s father’s house. The young bride could have come from the Long House to live at Puwige, the community house, with her husband’s family.
