Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) - A Record of Five Years' Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre; In the Tierra Caliente of Tepic and Jalisco; and Among the Tarascos of Michoacan by Carl Lumholtz
page 79 of 444 (17%)
have been five feet high. These traces of walls on the roof further
prove the important fact that this second story had been built in
terrace-fashion, receding about four feet back from the front of the
ground story.

The cave had evidently been occupied for a very long time, the houses
showing many alterations and additions, and on the walls I counted as
many as twelve coatings of plaster and whitewash. The conventional
design of the ear of corn is well preserved in every doorway. Rude
scrawlings of soot and water cover nearly all the front walls,
mixed here and there with a few traces of red ochre. There are
meander designs, lightning, and drawings of cows and horses; but
the latter were doubtless put on after the walls were demolished,
and their general appearance denotes recentness.

Several of the cyclopean riffles lead from the cave cliff to the
stream.

The houses here, as well as in all other caves we examined, were
built entirely of a powdery substance, the decomposed material of
the cave itself. Great quantities of it were found on the floors
of caves which had not been occupied by man. It is not of a sandy
nature, and its colour is light brown, sometimes almost grey, or
even white. The ancient builders simply had to mix it with water
and mould it into bricks, which, though fairly uniform in thickness,
were very irregular in size. There were no marks of implements on the
walls; all the work seems to have been done by hand and smoothed over
with some wetted fabric. In one cave of this valley the walls show
finger-marks on the plaster. Occasionally we found a small boulder
of hard stone embedded in the wall.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge