The third group, towers and great houses, includes buildings of oval, circular, semicircular, and rectangular shapes. Morphologically speaking, they do not present structural features of pueblos, for they are not terraced, neither have they specialized circular ceremonial rooms, kivas with vaulted roofs surrounded by rectangular rooms, or other essential features of the pueblo type. The group contains buildings which are sometimes consolidated with cliff-houses and pueblos, but are often independent of them. In this type are included castellated buildings in the Mancos, Yellow Jacket, McElmo, and the numerous northern tributary canyons of the San Juan.
Villages
RECTANGULAR RUINS OF
THE PURE TYPE
As the word is used in this report, a village is a cluster of houses separated from each other, each building constructed on the same plan, viz, a circular ceremonial room or kiva with mural banquettes and pilasters for the support of a vaulted roof, inclosed in rectangular rooms. When there is one kiva and surrounding angular rooms we adopt the name “unit type.” When, as in the larger mounds, there are indications of several kivas or unit types consolidated—the size being in direct proportion to the number—we speak of the building as belonging to the “pure type.” Doctor Prudden, who first pointed out the characteristics of the “unit type,”[12] has shown its wide distribution in the McElmo district. The Mummy Lake village has 16 mounds indicating houses. Far View House, one of these houses, is made up of an aggregation of four unit types and hence belongs to the author’s “pure type.”
While villages similar to the Mummy Lake group, in the valleys near Mesa Verde, have individual variations, the essential features are the same, as will appear in the following descriptions of Surouaro, and ruins at Goodman Point, Mud Spring, Aztec Spring, and Mitchell Spring. Commonly, in these villages, one mound predominates in size over the others, and while rectangular in form, has generally circular depressions on the surface, recalling conditions at Far View mound before excavation. These mounds indicate large buildings in blocks, made up of many unit forms of the pure type, united into compact structures. One large dominant member of the village recalls those ruins where the village is consolidated into one community pueblo. The separation of mounds in the village and their concentration in the community house may be of chronological importance, although the relative age of the simple and composite forms can not at present be determined; but it is important to recognize that the units of construction in villages and community buildings are identical.
Surouaro
The cluster of mounds formerly called Surouaro, now known as Yellow Jacket Spring Ruin, is situated near the head of the canyon of the same name to the left of the Monticello road, 14 miles west of Dolores. This village ([pls. 1, c]; [2, c]) contains both large and small houses of the pure pueblo type, covering an area somewhat less than the Mummy Lake group, on the Mesa Verde. The arrangement of mounds in clusters naturally recalls the Galisteo and Jemez districts, New Mexico, where, however, the arrangement of the mounds and the structure of each is different. The individual houses in a Mesa Verde or Yellow Jacket village were not so grouped as to inclose a rectangular court, but were irregularly distributed with intervals of considerable size between them.[13]
The largest mound in the Surouaro village, shown in [plate 1, c], corresponds with the so-called “Upper House” of Aztec Spring Ruin, but is much larger than Far View or any other single mound in the Mummy Lake village.
Surouaro was one of the first ruins in this region described by American explorers, attention having been first called to it by Professor Newberry,[14] whose description follows: “Surouaro is the name of a ruined town which must have once contained a population of several thousands. The name is said to be of Indian (Utah) origin, and to signify desolation, and certainly no better could have been selected.... The houses are, many of them, large, and all built of stone, hammer dressed on the exposed faces. Fragments of pottery are exceedingly common, though like the buildings, showing great age.... The remains of metates (corn mills) are abundant about the ruins. The ruins of several large reservoirs, built of masonry, may be seen at Surouaro, and there are traces of acequias which led to them, through which water was brought, perhaps from a great distance.”