These pictographs are so rude that they give little idea of the artistic possibilities of their makers, while many are so worn that even the subjects intended to be depicted are doubtful.
The walls of some of the rooms in the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings still show figures painted while the rooms were inhabited. Among these the favorite designs are of triangular form.
The walls of the secular rooms and kivas of Spruce-tree House were formerly covered with a thin wash of colored sand which was well adapted for paintings of symbolic or decorative character. The colors (yellow, red, and white), were evidently put on with the hands, impressions of which can be found in several places. In some cases, as with the upper part of the wall painted white and the lower part red, the contrast brings out the colors very effectively. The walls of some of the rooms are blackened with smoke.
Among the designs used are the triangular figures on the upper margin of the dados and pedestals of kivas. Figures similar in form, but reversed, are made by the Hopi, who call them butterfly and raincloud symbols.
Birds and quadrupeds.—Nordenskiöld (pp. 108-9) thus writes of one of the ancient paintings:
The first of them, fig. 77, is executed in a room at Sprucetree House. Here too the lower part of the mural surface is dark red, and triangular points of the same colour project over the yellow plaster; above this lower part of the wall runs a row of red dots, exactly as in the estufa at Ruin 9. To the left two figures are painted, one of them evidently representing a bird, the other a quadruped with large horns, probably a mountain sheep. [Elsewhere, as quoted on p. 5, Nordenskiöld identifies these figures as “two birds.”] The painting shown in fig. 78 is similar in style to the two just described.
In this room the dado bears at intervals along its upper edge the triangular figures already noticed, and rows of dots which appear to be a symbolic decoration, occurring likewise on pottery, as an examination of the author’s collection makes evident.
Square figures.—On the eastern wall of the same room in which occur the figures of a bird and a horned mammal there is a square figure on the white surface of the upper wall. This figure is black in outline; part of the surface bears an angular meander similar to decorations on some pieces of pottery. Similar designs, arranged in series according to Mindeleff’s figures, form the decoration band of one of the kivas in Chelly canyon.
The significance of this figure is unknown but its widespread distribution, especially in that region of the Southwest characterized by circular kivas, adds considerable interest to its interpretation.