University of Virginia Library

STRATIGRAPHY

A few days after we made camp I selected a previously undisturbed
site near the crest of the West Mound, cleared away the uppermost
12-14 inches because it was loose and trampled, and dug
a trench to clear sand at a depth of 20 feet (pl. 6, left). Our sampling
was limited to a 3-foot square at the end of that trench, and the
successive layers, irrespective of thickness, were determined by the
materials between. Lenses of ash, vegetal matter, and blown sand
provided clear-cut separations. We were seeking fragments of
pottery, then as now a handy gage of cultural progress, but were not
prepared to find early and late types—sherds typologically different
and distinct—intermixed throughout the full 20 feet. Nor were we
prepared to find, throughout, pieces of sandstone and chunks of
discarded mud mortar in quantities dwarfing village debris. The West
Refuse Mound was not a normal trash pile.

In that first attempt at stratigraphy we recovered 2,118 potsherds
from 23 separate strata (U.S.N.M. No. 334180), and early and late

types were associated, top to bottom. Of the total, 820 fragments, or
38.7 percent, were black-on-white, and of these 345 were early varieties
—types that Roberts and Amsden later designated Transitional, Degenerate
Transitional, and Solid—while 48 percent were Hachure B,
a late and preponderant variety at Pueblo Bonito. In Stratum T, an
18-inch thick layer beginning at depth of 15 feet 9 inches, there were
24 Early Black-on-white fragments and 29 of Hachure B. There
were three proto-Mesa Verde fragments among the 2,118—one from
Stratum H and two from N—but none I would consider Classic
Mesa Verde. Only 93 sherds, 4.3 percent of the total, were of Plainbanded
Culinary ware; 36.7 percent were Corrugated-coil. We recovered
five Plain-banded and six Corrugated-coil fragments from
Stratum U, between 17 feet 3 inches and 17 feet 8 inches deep. Such
intermixture was illogical and frustrating.

There are those who still debate the distinguishing characteristics
of "early" and "late" Pueblo pottery. My own 1921 yardstick, a
combination of form and decoration, was based on several seasons'
fieldwork among ruins north of the San Juan River. I recognized as
"early" that pottery assemblage which included Banded-neck cook
pots, half-gourd ladles, squat pitchers with wide mouths, and deep
round-bottomed bowls slipped with white and bearing such familiar
black-paint designs as stepped squares or triangles, key-shaped figures,
interlocking whorls, checkerboard, and waved or squiggled lines.
"Late" pottery, to me, included the bowl-and-handle ladle, Corrugatedcoil
Culinary ware, ollas with down-raking handles, thick-walled bowls
with dotted rims, zoned decoration, and polished surfaces. But in
Chaco Canyon late black-on-white vessels had whiter slips and blacker
paint than those with which I was familiar and an endless variety
of rectilinear figures featuring straight-line hachure. To find these
two groups intermingled throughout 20 feet of village waste was confusing
in itself but the preponderance of constructional debris was
confusion confounded. We cut a second stratigraphic section without
clarifying the puzzle.

In 1922 we sectioned the West Mound a third time and made a
more determined effort in the other. Two years later we tried both
mounds again. In each of my seven attempts at Pueblo Bonito
stratigraphy the results were identical: A preponderance of building
waste intermixed with debris of occupation that contained both early
and late pottery. How this mystery finally was solved has been related
in a previous report (Judd, 1954, pp. 175-177), but, the better
to understand our present subject, I may add that the Late Bonitians

were indefatigable builders. They were continually tearing down and
replacing perfectly serviceable structures and the waste from such
activities, along with their daily household sweepings, was carried
out and dumped south of the pueblo. But, as we later learned to
our astonishment, these discards had filled a broad, pre-Bonito
floodway several feet deep before they began to pile up to form the
two principal refuse mounds under consideration.

The Hyde Exploring Expedition in 1896 trenched both East and
West mounds in search for Bonitian burials (Pepper, 1920, p. 26),
and others on the same quest had been there before. Pepper does not
elaborate upon these operations, but his pre-excavation view from
the north cliff (ibid., fig. 3, p. 20) shows both trenches, the larger
crossing the West Mound opposite Rooms 138-140 and, on either
side of it, lesser trenches exposing the north enclosing wall.

In July 1916, two years after his important pioneering studies
in the Galesteo Basin, New Mexico, N. C. Nelson, of the American
Museum of Natural History, sought stratigraphic data from these
same Bonito mounds—the first inquiry of its kind undertaken here—
and his findings were hastily summarized four years later for inclusion
in the Pepper volume (ibid., pp. 383-385). Nelson apparently
took advantage of the two Hyde Expedition trenches for a vertical
cut was to be seen at the side of each in 1920, the year of the
National Geographic Society's Chaco Canyon reconnaissance (pl. 3).

As the one who introduced stratigraphy as a method of archeological
analysis in the Southwest and who elsewhere had built a
foundation for all subsequent research in this field, Nelson was both
surprised and disappointed with the results of his observations in
Pueblo Bonito refuse. He was disappointed because his sherd totals
disclosed less evidence than he had anticipated, and he was surprised,
as I was, by the incredible quantities of refuse from razed buildings.

Nelson's observations were restricted to two vertical columns, each
2 by 4 feet, which he divided arbitrarily into 6-inch layers for the
recovery and study of potsherds. From the first column, in the West
Mound and 16 feet deep, he recovered 1,083 fragments; from the
East Mound column, 11½ feet deep, 1,040 fragments. These he
sorted into four principal groups—corrugated, black-on-white, red,
and shiny black—and then subdivided each lot on the basis of ornamentation.
There were more than 20 varieties in the black-on-white
group alone.

In the upper layers Nelson expected to find only black-on-white
sherds bearing hachured designs, or a combination of hachured and

solid. From the lower layers he expected only those with thin,
parallel lines and other early-type figures. To his surprise, however,
there was direct association of the two groups throughout both
columns. Mesa Verde-type sherds appeared first in the middle deposits;
red ware and shiny black, scarce or absent at the bottom, occurred
more frequently toward the top. Corrugated, present from
top to bottom, comprised less than a third of the total sherd count
(Nelson, ibid., p. 384).

This association of early- and late-type pottery baffled me no less
than it had Nelson. There seemed no explanation for the fact that
here, in these two great refuse piles, fragments of globular, shortnecked
pitchers lay side by side with fragments of those having
small bodies and high, cylindrical necks; that pieces of bowl-andhandle
ladles lay juxtaposed with ladle fragments of half-gourd
form; that sherds of bowls and ollas painted with stepped lines and
triangles, volutes and interlocking whorls, checkerboard patterns, and
squiggled hatching should occur with or even above those bearing
designs in straight-line hachure. In addition, there remained the
problem of building waste, unbelievable quantities of broken sandstone
and chunks of wall adobe spread irregularly through household
debris.

As stated above, we of the National Geographic Society's Pueblo
Bonito Expeditions were quite unaware of Nelson's earlier studies
here when we undertook in 1921 to learn the sequence of local pottery
development. During our first four summers we made altogether
seven serious attempts toward this end, and each time we were
thwarted by the same inexplicable mixture of unrelated pottery types
and by the abundance of waste from building operations. Not until
1925 when I invited Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr., and the late Monroe
Amsden to join my field staff and take charge of pottery research
was the puzzle solved. Early that season we had extended our West
Mound trench to the ruin and northward through the length of the
West Court (fig. 7). In so doing there were brought to light the
remains of a Great Kiva built in an excavation dug 10 feet deep into
an Old Bonitian trash pile and, nearby, an undisturbed remnant of
that old pile.

Into that remnant Amsden and Roberts sank two yard-square
stratigraphic sections, the first 13 feet deep and the second, 12. A
few pre-Pueblo sherds were found near the bottom, but otherwise all
the fragments recovered from the lower 8 feet were early types:
Banded-neck cook pots; squat, round-bottomed pitchers; half-gourd

ladles and water jars with low-neck, if any—the black-on-white
pieces decorated with mineral paint in a variety of rectilinear and
curvilinear designs. Only from the upper third of those two 12-footdeep
sections were sherds recovered that bear design elements in
Straight-line Hachure, a combination of Straight-line and Solid,
Chaco-San Juan and, less frequently, those characteristic of the
Mesa Verde plateau. Thus our West Court Trench revealed both
the sequence of pottery types at Pueblo Bonito and one very obvious
reason for the admixture of occupational and constructional debris
in the two principal refuse mounds.

Early during their residence here the Late Bonitians chose to build
a super-kiva where Old Bonitian housewives had long been accustomed
to throw their household sweepings. That Great Kiva, 50 feet
in diameter and 10 feet deep, served its purpose for a time and then
was completely dismantled. Thus, in turn, approximately 39,000
cubic feet of Old Bonitian rubbish were removed to provide space
for the kiva and subsequently, when the kiva was razed, all building
materials not suitable for reuse were carried away and discarded.
Much of this waste went to the south refuse mounds where, with
like material from other sources, the two piles gradually increased in
height as they spread out laterally—east, west, and south.