As there is no positive knowledge as to when the cliff
dwellers flourished, one man's guess on the subject is as good as
another's.
An important discovery was recently made near Mancos, Colorado,
where a party of explorers found in some old cliff dwellings
graves beneath graves that were entirely different from anything
yet discovered. They were egg-shaped, built of stone and
plastered smoothly with clay. They contained mummies, cloth,
sandals, beads and various other trinkets. There was no pottery,
but many well-made baskets, and their owners have been called the
basket makers. There was also a difference in the skulls found.
The cliff dwellers' skull is short and flattened behind, while
the skulls that were found in these old graves were long, narrow
and round on the back.[6]
[6] An Elder Brother of the Cliff Dwellers, by T. M. Prudden,
M.D. Harper's Magazine, June, 1897.
Rev. H. M. Baum, who has traveled all over the southwest and
visited every large ruin in the country, considers that Canon de
Chelly and its branch, del Muerto, is the most interesting
prehistoric locality in the United States. The Navajos, who now
live in the canon, have a tradition that the people who occupied
the old cliff houses were all destroyed in one day by a wind of
fire.[7] The occurrence, evidently, was similar to what happened
recently on the island of Martinique, when all the inhabitants of
the village of St.
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