ment, for their protection, at the close of the twentieth century many of the most interesting monuments of the prehistoric peoples of our Southwest will be little more than mounds of debris at the bases of the cliffs. A commercial spirit is leading to careless excavations for objects to sell, and walls are ruthlessly overthrown, buildings torn down in hope of a few dollars' gain. The proper designation of the way our antiquities are treated is vandalism. Students who follow us, when these cliff-houses have all disappeared and their instructive objects scattered by greed of traders, will wonder at our indifference and designate our negligence by its proper name. It would be wise legislation to prevent this vandalism as much as possible and good science to put all excavation of ruins in trained hands. In this particular we have much to learn from the European method of control of the antiquities of the country by proper authorities or societies for the protection of historical monuments.

The parts of the cliff-houses were not continuous, but the town was separated into two portions by a projecting buttress of rock. About a hundred yards to the west of the section described, in a cave with overhanging roof, we found a second group of houses, which evidently formed a part of the same cliff pueblo. Its protected position made it a more remunerative ruin for excavation, and from it were obtained many most interesting relics of the former builders. Excavations likewise revealed the general character of the masonry, particularly the line of the floor or roof of a chamber, the walls of which had fallen. In the inner rooms of this portion of Palatki we dug up several good fragments of cotton cloth, much basketry and pottery, with nets made of agave fiber. The accumulated debris on the floor was found on removal to cover a fireplace in the middle of the room and a stone box used for grinding meal. There were also many corncobs and grains of maize, the latter regarded as indicative of the food of former inhabitants. This portion of the ruin, like the former, was originally three stories high, and contained at least fifteen rooms, ranging in size from four to twenty feet in dimensions. While it is very difficult to estimate the former population by the number of rooms, a conservative guess would lead me to suspect that the two sections together may have housed one phratry. Granting this as probable, we find that the two largest phratries of Walpi have sixty-eight and fifty

seven members respectively. At present, however, neither of these occupy the number of rooms there were in Palatki. As an approximation, I suggest that this cliff-house had one hundred inhabitants when peopled, which would allow six persons to a room. While this estimate would appear to indicate that the rooms were rather crowded, I know a family at Walpi of eight persons, a mother and two married daughters and three children, who occupy a room not larger than several at Palatki. It may be mentioned, however, that they have a second room for a granary, which was too dark and full of spiders to be visited with comfort. The former census of Palatki, on a basis of modern pueblo life, was not far from one hundred human beings.

About four miles west of Palatki is a small cliff-house, Honanki, the largest of those discovered by me in the Red Rocks. While it differs somewhat from Palatki, the resemblances are so close that it is referred to related people. It would seem that Palatki was the home of related clans of small size. Honanki, on the contrary, was a large pueblo comparable in size with Walpi. Its population was counted by hundreds, and it is by far the largest cliff-house yet reported from the Verde valley. Honanki was not, however, a compact village, but stretched along the face of the precipitous cliff for over an eighth of a mile. It is easy of access and can readily be entered from many points. As one approaches the ruin he enters it through a passageway situated about midway in its length, where there is a vista along the front wall of a number of rooms beginning with a high round tower at the eastern end. When we pass abreast of this tower the height of the ruin at that point is more apparent. It is protected by an overarching cliff, and is mounted on a shelf of rock ten feet high.

The front section of the ruin looking in an opposite direction. shows it to be about five hundred feet long, or not more than an eighth of the total length. To obtain a view of the whole ruin of Honanki at one glance was quite impossible, for it is partially hidden by a grove of trees from the plain below, and views along the front are obstructed by projecting buttresses of the cliff.

The tower of Honanki has windows and small peep-holes. The exterior wall of this part was not broken by an entrance, and from its top one could obtain a wide view over the neighboring tree tops.

Entering the section of Honanki which has been described, we find it divided into a series of inclosures communicating with each other from one end to the other. The nicely plastered walls still show the soot of former fires, while in several of the chambers the beams are still in place. This part of Honanki was three stories high, as shown by the evidence of flooring. The vertical cliff which formed the back of the rooms was in several places covered with soot and scored with pictographs. From that portion of Honanki which has been described the ruin extends along the cliff for an eighth of a mile and consists of a series of rooms plastered to the face of the precipice. The front wall of this row of chambers has fallen, and although the lateral walls are in place they are much dilapidated. The appearance indicates that there were two tiers of rooms, and that in places there were two parallel rows. It is not rare to find small granaries back of these rooms, separated from them by a rear wall of the chamber.

The excavations in the floor of these rooms of Honanki were more thorough than at Palatki, and revealed a number of objects of interest to the archeologist. Here was found a fine board identical with that still used by the Tusayan Indians in kindling fire on certain ceremonial occasions. A small reed within which was a wad of cotton somewhat charred was likewise found near a fireplace. The general form of this implement led me to suspect that it was a slow-match to conserve fire after it had been kindled by primitive methods. There were many specimens of sandals made of yucca fiber, cloth of cotton and agave, netting, and open-mesh woven cloth identical in pattern with leggings worn by a supernatural personification who performs a striking role in certain ceremonial performances at Tusayan today.

Of more than usual interest was a stone implement cemented with pitch into a wooden handle, a kind of instrument thus far not reported from other cliff-houses. To enumerate the different kinds of pottery obtained in our shallow excavations would take me into a too technical discussion of the small collection, but it may be mentioned that all the various forms of coiled ware, with fragments of black and white and red decorated vessels, were well represented. In all instances the decorations of the smooth varieties was in geometrical patterns.

In the complication of figures depicted upon it, the cliff-house pottery, of which Nordenskiöld has published a series from the Mancos canyon, does not equal that of certain prehistoric ruins of Tusayan, but indicates an undeveloped artistic taste. Geometric patterns predominate and highly specialized symbolic adornment is exceptional. The archaic black-and-white ware, which seems to be characteristic of cliff-houses, was not common, a fact which may have been due to the superficiality of my excavations.

The character of the culture of the people who once peopled the cliff-houses of the Red Rocks, as indicated by the objects found in their rooms, will be discussed in a monograph devoted to that subject.

Many beams, fragments of flooring, or roofing were found buried in the floor under the dust and ashes or still projecting from the walls. These tell an interesting story. Some of the logs were six or eight inches in diameter, but not a single specimen showed the marks of a metal implement. They had evidently been gnawed off to the required length with stone hatchets, aided no doubt by the live embers. Although acquainted only with these rude methods of cutting wood, the builders of Honanki in this way made boards for lintels, still in place in some of the windows. The labor of felling the trees and smoothing logs with stone implements must have been considerable.

The ruin of Honanki may have contained two hundred rooms, and its former population, by a conservative estimate, was not far from between three and four hundred people. This would give us a population double the size of Walpi today, and there can hardly be a doubt that Honanki housed more than one phratry.

High above the extreme west end of the houses there is perched a walled-up crypt, which is without external opening and inaccessible. Repeated attempts to approach this cyst were fruitless, and there is little doubt from its general appearance that it is a burial place similar to those found in the neighborhood of other cliff-houses of the Verde region. It probably will be found to contain a desiccated human body. Directly beneath it, on the top of the talus at the foundation of the ruin, was an ash heap, from which charred bones and fragments of pottery were taken.

The position of this ash heap and the objects found in it recall the places of burial so well described and figured by Nordenskiöld in his excellent memoir on the cliff-dwellers of the Mesa Verde.

There is no doubt but that the Red Rocks contain many other cliff-houses as large or possibly larger than those which I have described. Reports of the existence of these ruins are current among cowboys and prospectors, and an exploring expedition into this field would no doubt be rewarded with interesting discoveries. Only within a few months Mr McCarty, of Flagstaff, reports another large ruin in this vicinity, and out of one of the burial cysts he took a mummy, near which were fragments of pottery and stone implements. The occurrence of similar cysts is not uncommon in the Verde ruins, but is not confined to them. The theory, however, that they were chambers where human beings were immured alive as sacrificial offerings needs more conclusive evidence than has yet been adduced. While there are legends that would seem to indicate vicarious atonement by human sacrifice among prehistoric pueblo people, it is not necessary to resort to this explanation to account for the mummies found in special walled-up rooms of cliff-houses, for, like so many other theories thrown off by the imagination to create a sensation or startle the unwary, this explanation of mummies in closed cysts rests on little evidence that will bear scientific scrutiny.

We have practically no historic data bearing on the age of the two ruins of the Red Rocks. No mention is made of the dwellings in the Verde valley in early documents, and it is probable that, had they been inhabited in 1540, Coronado would have attempted to reach them in his memorable expedition. The trail which he took for Cibola, after leaving Chichilticalli, was doubtless more to the east, and he no doubt followed a wellknown trail used by natives in their visits. As he entered an uninhabited region after leaving the Sobaipuri, we may rightly suspect that the river valleys along the northern branches of the Salt had been abandoned before his advent. If so, we may conclude that the same was true of the houses on the Verde, for while he and his followers were eager for the famed cities of Cibola, they would naturally not plunge into a desert if an inhabited valley took them but little from their route. While it is not certain