The walls were constructed of the sandstone of the neighborhood. Many stone hammers and pecking stones were found in the vicinity.
THE SUN SYMBOL
On the upper surface of a large rock protruding from the base of the southwest corner of the building a peculiar depression, surrounded by radiating ridges, was found. To primitive minds, this may have appeared as a symbol of the sun and, therefore, deemed an object of great significance, to be protected as a shrine. This natural impression may have prompted Dr. Fewkes in the naming of this ruin.
ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES
There are three circular rooms in Sun Temple which from their form may be identified as ceremonial in function, technically called kivas. Two of these, free from other rooms, are situated in the plaza that occupies the central part of the main building, and one is embedded in rooms of the so-called "annex." Adjoining the last mentioned, also surrounded by rooms, is a fourth circular chamber which is not a kiva. This room, found to be almost completely filled with spalls or broken stones, perhaps originally served as an elevated tower or lookout.
The kiva that is situated in the west section of Sun Temple has a ventilator stack attached to the south side, recalling the typical ventilator of a Mesa Verde cliff kiva, and there are indications of the same structure in the two circular chambers in the court. These kivas, however, have no banquettes or pilasters to support a vaulted roof, and no fragments of roof beams were found in the excavations made at Sun Temple. East of Sun Temple, where formerly there was only a mound of stone and earth, there were found the remains of a low circular structure of undetermined use.
Most of the peripheral rooms of Sun Temple open into adjoining rooms, a few into the central court, but none has external openings. Some of the rooms are without lateral entrances, as if it were intended to enter them through a hatch in the roof.
Not only pits indicative of the stone tools by which the stones forming the masonry of Sun Temple were dressed appear on all the rocks used in its construction, but likewise many bear incised symbols. Several of these still remain in the walls of the building; others have been set in cement near the outer wall of the eastern kiva. It is interesting to record that some of the stones of which the walls were constructed were probably quarried on the mesa top not far from the building, but as the surface of the plateau is now forested, the quarries themselves are hidden in accumulated soil and are difficult to discover.
AGE
Sun Temple is believed to be among the latest constructed of all the aboriginal buildings in the park, probably contemporaneous with late building activities in Balcony House, Spruce Tree House, and Cliff Palace.