elba peach grove resemble the lower
terraces of Wipo. About 100 rods farther south, along the foot of the
mesa, on the same level, are a number of unused fields, and a cluster
of house remains. The whole of this terrace is of a type which shows
greater action of the weather than the others, but the boundaries of
the fields are still marked with rows of stones. The adjacent
foothills contain piles of ashes in several places, as if the sites of
ancient pottery kilns, and very old stone inclosures occur on the top
of the mesa above Kanelba. All indications seem to point to the
ancient occupancy of the region about Kanelba by many more farmers
than today. Possibly the inhabitants of Sikyatki, which is only two or
three miles away, frequented this place and cultivated these ancient
gardens. Kanelba is regarded as a sacred spring by several Hopi
religious societies of East Mesa. The Snake priests of Walpi always
celebrate a feast there on the day of the snake hunt to the east in
odd years,[104] while in the alternate years it is visited by the
Flute men.

The present appearance of Sikyatki (plate CXV) is very desolate, and
when visited by our party previously to the initiation of the work,
seemed to promise little in the way of archeological results. No walls
were standing above ground, and the outlines of the rooms were very
indistinct. All we saw at that time was a series of mounds,
irregularly rectangular in shape, of varying altitude, with here and
there faint traces of walls. Prominent above all these mounds,
however, was the pinnacle of rock on the northwestern corner, rising
abruptly from the remainder of the ruin, easily approached from the
west and sloping more gradually to the south. This rocky elevation,
which we styled the acropolis, was doubtless once covered with houses.

On the western edge of the ruin a solitary farmhouse, used during the
summer season, had been constructed of materials from the old walls,
and was inhabited by an Indian named Lelo and his family during our
excavations. He is the recognized owner of the farm land about
Sikyatki and the cultivator of the soil in the old plaza of the ruins.
Jakwaina, an enterprising Tewan who lives not far from Isba, the
spring near the trail to Hano, has also erected a modern house near
the Sikyatki spring, but it had not been completed at the time of our
stay. Probably never since its destruction in prehistoric times have
so many people as there were in our p