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

Casa Grande Ruin - Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the - Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1891-92, - Government Printing Office, Washington, 1896, pages 289-318 by Cosmos Mindeleff
page 29 of 44 (65%)
The walls of the northern room are fairly well preserved, except in the
northeastern corner, which has fallen. The principal floor beams were of
necessity laid north and south, across the shorter axis of the room,
while the secondary series of poles, 1½ inches in diameter, have left
their impression in the eastern and western walls. There is no setback
in the northern wall at the first floor level, though there is a very
slight one in the southern wall; none appears in the eastern and western
walls. Yet in the second roof level there is a double setback of 9 and 5
inches in the western wall, and the northern wall has a setback of 9
inches, and the top of the wall still shows the position of nearly all
the roof timbers. This suggests--and the suggestion is supported by
other facts to be mentioned later--that the northern room was added
after the completion of the rest of the edifice.

The second roof or third floor level, the present top of the wall, has a
decided pitch outward, amounting to nearly 5 inches. Furthermore, the
outside of the northern wall of the middle room, above the second roof
level of the northern room, is very much eroded. This indicates that the
northern room never had a greater height than two stories, but probably
the walls were crowned with low parapets. In this connection it may be
stated that a calculation of the amount of débris within the building
and for a distance of 10 feet about it in every direction, the interior
floor level being determined by excavation, showed an amount of material
which, added to the walls, would raise them less than 3 feet; in other
words, the present height of the walls is very nearly the maximum
height.

Subsequent to this examination the ruin was cleared out by contractors
for the Government in carrying out a plan for the repair and
preservation of the ruin, and it was reported that in one of the rooms a
DigitalOcean Referral Badge