c cones
rise, and the whole upper region is covered with forests interspersed
with beautiful prairies. The plateau itself is intersected with many
deep, narrow canyons, having walls of lava, volcanic dust, or tufa, and
red sandstone. It is a beautiful region. The low mesas on every side are
almost treeless and are everywhere deserts, but the great Tewan Plateau
is booned with abundant rains, and it is thus a region of forests and
meadows, divided into blocks by deep, precipitous canyons and crowned
with cones that rise to an altitude of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet.

For many centuries the Tewan Plateau, with its canyons below and its
meadows and forests above, has been the home of tribes of Tewan Indians,
who built pueblos, sometimes of the red sandstones in the canyons, but
oftener of blocks of tufa, or volcanic dust. This light material can be
worked with great ease, and with crude tools of the harder lavas they
cut out blocks of the tufa and with them built pueblos two or three
stories high. The blocks are usually about twenty inches in length,
eight inches in width, and six inches in thickness, though they vary
somewhat in size. On the volcanic cones which dominate the country these
people built shrines and worshiped their gods with offerings of meal and
water and with prayer symbols made of the plumage of the birds of the
air. When the Navajo invasion came, by which kindred tribes were
displaced from the district farther west, these Tewan Indians left their
pueblos on the plateau and their dwellings by the rivers below in the
depths of the canyon and constructed cavate homes for themselves; that
is, they excavated chambers in the cliffs where these cliffs were
composed of soft, friable tufa. On the face of the cliff, hundreds of
feet high and thousands of feet or even miles in length, they dug out
chambers with stone tools, these chambers being little rooms eight or
ten feet in diameter. Sometimes two or more such chambers connected.
Then they constructed stairways in the soft rock, by which their cavate
houses were reached; and in these rock shelters they lived during times
of war. When the Navajo invasion was long past, civilized men as Spanish
adventurers entered this country from Mexico, and again the Tewan
peoples left their homes on the mesas and by the canyons to find safety
in the cavate dwellings of the cliffs; and now the archaeologist in the
study of this country discovers these two periods of construction