Many fireplaces still remain in rooms, but the majority are found in convenient corners of the plazas[34]. The most common situation is in an angle formed by two walls; in which case the fire-pit is generally rimmed with a slightly elevated rounded ridge of adobe. In room 84 there is a fireplace in the middle of the floor. At one side of this depression there extends a supplementary groove in the floor, rimmed with stone, the use of which is not known. Although fireplaces are ordinarily half round, a square one occurs in the northwestern corner of room 81. All the fireplaces contained wood ashes, sometimes packed hard; but no cinders, large fragments of charcoal, or coal ashes were evident. The sides of the walls above the fireplaces are generally blackened with smoke.
The fire-holes of the kivas, being specially constructed, are different in shape from those in secular houses. While the cooking fire-pits are generally shallow, kiva fire-holes a foot deep are not exceptional, and several are much deeper. The fire was kindled in the kiva not so much for heating the room, as for lighting it, there being no windows for that purpose. Certain kinds of fuel were probably prescribed, but logs were not burned in kivas on account of the heat. No evidences of smoke-hoods or chimneys have been found in any of the Cliff Palace rooms. The walls of many kivas showed blackening by soot or smoke.
Living Rooms
It is difficult to distinguish rooms in which the inhabitants lived from others used by them for storage and other purposes, since most of their work, as cooking, pottery making, and like domestic operations, was conducted either on the house-tops or in the plazas. Under living rooms are included the women's rooms[35], or those in which centered the family life; and, in a general way, we may suppose the large rooms and those with banquettes were sleeping rooms. The popular misconception that the cliff-dwellers were of small stature has undoubtedly arisen from the diminutive size of all the secular rooms, but it must be remembered that the life of the cliff-dwellers was really an out-of-door one, the roof of the cave affording the necessary protection.
| BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY | BULLETIN 51 [PLATE 15] |
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| PHOTOGRAPHED BY R. G. FULLER | |
| SPEAKER-CHIEF'S HOUSE, AFTER REPAIRING | |
Milling Rooms
There are several rooms in Cliff Palace which appear to have been given up solely to the operation of grinding corn. The mills are box-like structures, constructed of slabs of stone set on edge, each containing a slanting stone called a metate, from which the mill is called by the Hopi the metataki, or "metate house." The following description of a metataki in pueblos seen by Castañeda in 1540 applies, in a general way, to the small milling troughs in Cliff Palace:
One room is appointed for culinary purposes, another for the grinding of corn; the latter is isolated [not so in Cliff Palace] and contains an oven and three stones [one, two, three, or four in Cliff Palace], cemented finely together. Three women sit [kneel] before these stones; the first crushes the corn, the second grinds it, and the third reduces it quite to a powder.
In grinding corn, which was generally the work of the girls or young women, the grinder knelt before the metataki and used a flat stone, which was rubbed back and forth on the metate. The corn meal thus ground fell into a squarish depression, made of smooth stones, at the lower end of the metate. Commonly the corners of this receptacle for the meal that had been ground were filled in with clay, and on each side of the metate were inserted fragments of pottery, which rounded the corners and made it easier to brush the meal into a heap. In room 92, where there are four metates, occupying almost the whole milling room, there are upright stones on the side of the wall, back of the place where the women knelt, against which they braced their feet.