(3) Rectangular rooms, some of which have benches and show evidence of having been living rooms.
(4) Large rooms each with a fireplace in the middle of the floor.
(5) Rooms with metates set in bins made of stone slabs (milling rooms).
(6) Courts and streets. The longest street extends from the middle of the ruin to the western end and is lined on both sides by rooms many of the roofs of which are still intact.
An instructive architectural feature of some of the rooms of this ruin is the use of upright logs in supporting corners. Part of the roof of one of these rooms situated deep in the cave is formed by the natural rock and the remainder by an artificial covering supported by upright logs forked at the end to receive the rafters.
Scaffold House
This ruin, about 2 miles from the place where two large canyons open into Laguna creek, lies in a cavern worn in the side of a large butte on the left of the stream. It is appropriately called Scaffold House from a finely made wooden scaffold (fig. 1) which the ancients constructed in a vertical cleft in the cliff about 50 feet above the east end of the ruin. Although this scaffold is now inaccessible from the walls of the room below, all the beams and much of the earthen floor still remain.
Fig. 1. Scaffold of Scaffold House.
The construction of the scaffold is as follows: The crevice in which it lies is rectangular, with the longest axis vertical. Several large logs placed horizontally, their ends fitted into holes pecked in the sides of the crevice, support smaller beams laid across them at right angles. These latter in turn are covered with small sticks on which are laid bark and clay, leaving a hatchway at a point about midway. The construction of this scaffold, probably as daring a piece of aerial building as can be found anywhere among cliff-dwellings, is so well preserved that it shows no sign of deterioration. We can only conjecture what its use may have been, but the plausible suggestion has been made that it was an outlook or place of defense.