n the period of desiccation, or drought from the recession of the
glacial waters, began.

[Illustration: Ruins of South House, one of the great communal dwellings
of Frijoles Canyon, after excavation]

"The existence of man in the Glacial Period is established," says
Winchell, the great western geologist, "that implies man during the
period when flourished the large mammals now extinct. In short, there is
as much evidence pointing to America as to Asia as the primal birthplace
of man." Now the ice invasion began hundreds of thousands of years ago;
and the last great recession is set at about 10,000 years; and the
implements of Stone Age man are found contemporaneous with the glacial
silt.

* * * * *

There is not another section in the whole world where you can wander for
days amid the houses and dead cities of the Stone Age; _where you can
literally shake hands with the Stone Age_.

Shake hands? Isn't that putting it a little strong? It doesn't sound
like the dry-as-dust dead collections of museums. It may be putting it
strong; but it is also meticulously and simply--true. A few doors away
from the cave-house where I sit, lies a little body--no, not a mummy! We
are not in Egypt. We are in America; but we often have to go to Egypt to
find out the wonders of America. Lies a little body, that of a girl of
about eighteen or twenty, swathed in otter and beaver skins with leg
bindings of woven yucca fiber something like modern burlap. Woven cloth
from 20,000 to 10,000 B. C.? Yes! That is pretty strong, isn't it? 'Tis
when you come to consider it; our European ancestors at that date were
skipping through Hyrcanian Forests clothed mostly in the costume Nature
gave them; Herbert Spencer would have you believe, skipping round with
simian gibbering monkey jaws and claws, clothed mostly in apes' hair.
Yet there lies the little lady in the cave to my left, the long black
hair shiny and lustrous yet, the skin dry as parchment still holding the
finger bones together, head and face that of a human, not an ape, all
well preserved owing to the gypsum dust and the high, dry climate in
which the corpse has lain.

In my collection, I have bits of cloth taken from a body which
archaeologists date not later than 400 A. D. nor earlier than 8,000 B.
C., and bits of corn and pottery from water jars, placed with the dead
to sustain them on the long journey to the Other World. For the last
year, I have worn a