This broken section of wall shows its construction of a core of rough stone faced with smaller, selected stones, each having at least three plane surfaces. Note that the wall is thick at the bottom where the entire weight was carried, but is narrower at the top where less strength was needed. The tapering is evidence of prior planning—the builders knew when they started that they were going to build four to five stories—but the wall was not erected as a single operation. As the height for each story was reached, beams were built into the wall, and the ceiling was covered to provide a platform from which to work while raising the walls another stage.
6
You are standing near the ceiling level of the ground floor rooms. Rock debris and silting from the canyon wall has buried the lower part of the house. By referring to the ground plan at the front of the booklet you can see that this section of the wall is a “curtain wall” with a narrow, triangular space behind it. Visible in the masonry are the butts of small poles used as tie rods that bridge the opening behind the wall. The space was not a room, but was filled to lend strength to the juncture of the older western section and a new arc of outside wall running east. At the top of the wall to your right you can see timbers built into masonry like reinforcing rods.
At the foot of the cliff behind the ruin are the remains of a kiva and a one-room house built against the rock. There is an interesting petroglyph cut into the sandstone.
7
You may walk into this small ground floor storeroom to inspect the original ceiling. The doorway was once plugged with masonry, but it was opened by an early explorer. This section of the pueblo is part of the first construction of Pueblo Bonito behind the older pueblo of the A.D. 900’s. Tree-ring dates from the Ponderosa pine vigas indicate that the room was built in A.D. 1038. Peeled willow sticks were laid across the beams and covered with juniper bark, and finally about six inches of packed soil to make a floor for the room above. The room to the left has not been excavated.
The next doorway you pass on your way to Station 8 is now closed with a modern gate. The room behind it was used for a storeroom by Richard Wetherill whose first camp was pitched outside the wall of the pueblo in this vicinity. When Pueblo Bonito was built there were 18 doorways in the rear wall, but all were plugged up by the Indians at some later date so that the only entry into the house was at the south wall of the plaza.
8
The rooms surrounding you are part of the old, southeast-facing pueblo, built between 919 and about 936, over and around which the grander Pueblo Bonito was built 100 years later. Note the cruder masonry and thinner walls. The vertical poles incorporated into the wall in front of you represent an earlier method of construction. Often the poles supported a matting or wattle of small branches which served as lath to hold a thin wall of mud plaster. Later the people used small posts as a frame for stacking hand-molded adobe bricks or stones, and still later began to lay ashlar courses in which the strength was gained by lapping stones across the joints between stones in the course below. When Pueblo Bonito was built, the eastern end of the old pueblo was leveled to make way for new rooms, and some rooms at the southwest end were torn out when kivas were put in.