[77] The house burials appear to have been mainly those of priests or other important personages.
[78] A true comparison of the mesa habitation and the cliff-dwelling can be made only by renewed work on the former, which is now little more than a huge pile of fallen walls. Present indications show a greater antiquity of the mesa ruin, the site of which afforded more adequate protection. On this supposition the mesa ruins would be considered older than the cliff ruins, and those of the valley the most ancient. If the ruins in Montezuma valley are the oldest, we can not suppose that the culture originated in the cliffs and spread to the valley. The circular subterranean kiva bears indication of having originated in valleys rather than in caverns. Nordenskiöld does not mention the large ruin on the bluff west of Cliff Palace.
Transcriber's Notes:
- Obvious minor typographical errors have been corrected silently.
- Illustrations have been moved to the end of paragraphs so as to not disrupt the flow of the text.
- Variations in hyphenation, word spacing and spelling left as printed.
- [Plate 35] moved from page 76 into its appropriate section under Bone implements.
Corrections made appear in [square brackets]:
On [Pg. 19]:
- "d'un point plus elévé [élevé]"
- "d'ou [d'où] l'on contemple les ruines"
- "de grands progrés [progrès] dans l'art"
- "Les murs sont faits de grés [grès] gris,"
Not Changed:
- Homólobi, Homolobi
- embedded, imbedded
- enclosures, inclosures
- Sprucetree, Spruce tree, Spruce-tree
- heartshaped, heart-shaped
- peepholes, peep-holes
- southeast, south-east
- Sprucetree House, Spruce-tree House