19]

There are several square ruins on top of the mesa above the cavate
dwellings. The walls of these were massive, but they are now very much
broken down, and the adobe plastering is so eroded from the masonry
that I regard them of considerable antiquity. They do not differ from
other similar ruins, so common elsewhere in New Mexico and Arizona,
and are identical with others in the Verde region. I visited several
of these ruins, but made no excavations in them, nor added any new
data to our knowledge of this type of aboriginal buildings. The
pottery picked up on the surface resembles that of the ruins of the
Little Colorado and Gila.

The dwellings which I have mentioned above are said[20] to be
duplicated at many other points in the watershed of the Verde, and
many undescribed ruins of this nature were reported to me by ranchmen.
I do not regard them as older than the adjacent ruins on the mesa
above or the plains below them, much less as productions of people of
different stages of culture, for everything about them suggests
contemporaneous occupancy.

From what little I saw of the village sites on the Verde I believe
that Mindeleff is correct in considering that these ruins represent
a comparatively late period of pueblo architecture. The character
of the cliff houses of the Red-rocks shows no very great antiquity of
occupancy. While it is not possible to give any approximate date when
they were inhabited, their general appearance indicates that they are
not more than two centuries old. There is, however, no reference to
them in the early Spanish history of the Southwest.

[Illustration: BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY

SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XCIII

BOWLDER WITH PICTOGRAPHS NEAR WOOD'S RANCH]

Few pictographs were found in the immediate neighborhood of the cavate
dwellings; indeed the rock in their vicinity is too soft to preserve
for any considerable time any great number of these rock etchings.
Examples of ancient paleography were, however, discovered a short
distance higher up the river on malpais rock, which is harder and less
rapidly eroded. A half-buried bowlder (plate XCIII) near Wood's ranch
was found to be covered with the well-known spirals with zigzag
attachments, horned animals resembling antelopes, growing corn, rain
clouds, and similar figures. These pictographs occur on a black,
superficial layer of lava rock, or upon lighter stone with a malpais
layer, which had been pecked through, show