Antiquities of the Mesa Verde National Park

by Jesse Walter Fewkes

The lower-story walls of room 26 are in fairly good condition, having needed but little repair. There is a good fireplace in the floor at the northeast corner. Excavations revealed a passageway from kiva D into room 26, the opening into the upper room being situated near its north wall. The west wall of room 26 is curved. The walls of rooms 27 and 28 are much dilapidated, the portion of the western section that remains being continuous with the front wall of the pueblo. A small mural fragment ending blindly arises from the outside of the west wall of room 27. This is believed to have been part of a small enclosure used for cooking purposes. Much repairing was necessary in the walls of rooms 27 and 28, since they were situated almost directly in the way of torrents of water which in time of rains fall over the rim of the canyon.

The block of rooms numbered 30-44, situated east of kiva E, have the most substantial masonry and are the best constructed of any in Spruce-tree House. ([Pl. 9.]) As room 45 is only a dark passageway it should be considered more a street than a dwelling. Rooms 30-36 are one story each in height, rectangular in shape, roofless, and of about the same dimensions; of these room 35 is perhaps the best preserved, having well-constructed fireplaces in one corner. Rooms 37, 38, 39 are built deep in the cavern; their walls, especially those of 38, are very much broken down. There would seem to be hardly a possibility that these rooms were inhabited, especially after the construction of the rooms in front of the cave which shut off all light. But they may easily have served as storage places. Their walls were constructed of well-dressed stones and afford an example of good masonry work.

Here and there are indications of other rooms in the darker parts of the cave. In some instances their walls extended to the roof of the cave where their former position is indicated by light bands on the sooty surface.

Rooms 40-47 are among the finest chambers in Spruce-tree House. Rooms 48 and 49 are very much damaged, the walls having fallen, leaving only the foundations above the ground level. Several rooms in this part of the ruin, especially rooms 43 ([pl. 9]) and 44, still have roofs and floors as well preserved as when they were built, and although dark, owing to lack of windows, they have fireplaces in the corners, the smoke escaping apparently through the diminutive door openings. The thresholds of some of the doorways are too high above the main court to be entered without ladders or notched poles, but projecting stones or depressions for the feet, still visible, apparently assisted the inhabitants, as they do modern visitors, to enter rooms 41 and 42.

Each of the small block of rooms 50-53 is one story and without a roof, but possessing well-preserved ground floors. In room 53 there is a depression in the floor at the bottom of which is a small hole.[11]

In the preceding pages there have been considered the rooms of the north section of Spruce-tree House, embracing dwellings, ceremonial rooms, and other enclosures north of the main court, and the space in the rear called the refuse-heap—in all, six circular ceremonial rooms and a large majority of the living and storage rooms. From all the available facts at the author’s disposal it is supposed that this portion is older than the south section, which contains but two ceremonial rooms and not more than a third the number of secular dwellings.[12]

The cluster of rooms connected with kivas G and H shows signs of having been built by a clan which may have joined Spruce-tree House subsequent to the construction of the north section of the village. The ceremonial rooms in this section differ in form from the others. Here occur two round rooms or towers, duplicates of which have not been found in the north section.

Room 61 in the south section of Spruce-tree House has a closet made of flat stones set on edge and covered with a perforated stone slab slightly inclined from the horizontal.

The inclosures at the extreme south end, which follow a narrow ledge, appear to have been unroofed passages rather than rooms. On ledges somewhat higher there are small granaries each with a hole in the side, probably for the storage of corn.

It will be noticed that the terraced form of buildings, almost universal in modern three-story pueblos and common in pictures of ruins south of the San Juan, does not exist in Spruce-tree House. The front of the three tiers of rooms 22, 23, as shown in [plate 3], is vertical, not terraced from foundation to top. Whether the walls of rooms now in ruins were terraced or not can not be determined, for these have been washed out and have fallen to so great an extent that it is almost impossible to tell their original form. Rooms 25-28, for instance, might have been terraced on the front side, but it is more reasonable to suppose they were not;[13] from the arrangement of doors it would seem that there was a lateral entrance on the ground floor rather than through roofs.