The T-shaped doorway, though not common, is found from Colorado and Utah south into the mountains of northern Mexico. We can only speculate about its purpose. Of the 32 T-doors remaining in Pueblo Bonito, most are exterior doors facing kiva courts.
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This well-preserved ceiling is the original one. The fresh-looking sawed ends and notches in the beams is where sections were removed for tree-ring dating. The small round holes, less destructive of the timber, are made with a hollow auger bit which removed a core—the preferred method of taking samples. Seven dates were obtained from the cores and sections in this room. Three of them were cutting dates, indicating the last year of the growth of the trees: A.D. 1077, 1078, and 1079. The construction date was probably 1079 or 1080.
Though this section of the pueblo was three stories high, some of the ground floor rooms were used as living quarters equipped with firepits. Relatively few firepits were found in the ruin, most of them in one story sections, in the open on the edges of the plaza, or next to an outer wall in a kiva courtyard, but there was evidence in the fill of the rooms that others had existed on the upper floors and on the terraced roofs.
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Above and to the left of the rooms you have just left is another corner window. On the morning of the winter solstice in December the rays of the rising sun shine through this window and strike the opposite corner of the room behind it, a fact that is probably more than coincidental. We know that in the 11th century Indians in Mexico were making solar and lunar observations and calculations that were in some respects more sophisticated than were possible in most of Europe.
The long low ridge in front of the pueblo was the trash dump. It was built up of ashes from the firepits, floor sweepings, construction debris, bones, food refuse, human waste, scraps from craftwork, broken pottery—everything that was no longer of any use. With only a little imagination one can picture the mound with a band of small, naked children playing “king of the hill”, and with foraging turkeys, and dogs burying or digging up bones.
Four story wall [photo by Hal Malde]