This community housed about 550 people in A.D. 1400 in a circular pueblo along the creek bank and in houses built up against the cliff face.
The cliff rock is a very soft volcanic tuff that can easily be carved out into rooms and sockets for floor and roof beams. It appears that most of the family homes consisted of a ground level storage room (not accessible from outside), a second level living and sleeping room, some with a third living level, and a veranda on the roof. For the cliff face structures many verandas and/or upper floors had a small niche hand-carved into the cliff face - we have yet to find an explanation for their uses.
The cliff-face walls show signs of plaster and painted decoration so we probably can assume that the stacked-stone walls were also plastered and painted. One cliff-face wall is relatively well preserved because sometime during the life of the house the wall was plastered over and probably repainted.
On the cliff face above all the roof-top verandas are petroglyphs of circles, zig-zags, people and animals (turkeys and ducks, primarily). There is even one that is interpreted as a macaw, the exotic tropical bird native to the Yucatan. Macaw feathers were found during excavations so we know that they had an extensive trade network.
Some cliff-face houses have rooms carved into the cliff. The decorations on the wall have lead archaeologists to believe that these are small kivas for important family leaders to conduct family religious and business activities.
The canyon-bottom pueblo had three kivas in the central courtyard probably for each of the family-based clans. However, there is a very large kiva a few hundred feet away that was probably for surrounding community leaders to gather for ceremonies and commerce.
Today we pack up and head for Albuquerque for a several day stay (length yet to be determined). We will visit more sites and visit with some old friends and colleagues.
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