Interpretation

View of Room 121, Square Tower, before treatment, 1998.

Architecture is the largest and most visible manifestation of Ancestral Puebloan culture of Mesa Verde, yet despite the extent of building remains, its architecture, until recently, has generally been understudied. With increasing limitations placed on new excavation and a greater sense of conservation responsibilities, archaeologists have begun to reexamine existing sites with a fresh eye and new tools for extracting new information. As early as 1908, during his first campaigns at Mesa Verde, Jesse Walter Fewkes cautioned,

"...archaeological field work in the southwest has been devoted mainly to making collections of pottery and small portable antiquities. In the effort to gather these minor antiquities, the walls of ruins have been mutilated and left without any thought of protection from the elements. Architectural data has been sacrificed to obtain collections..."

Compared with other material remains (artifacts and ecofacts), the study of architectural fabric has lagged far behind regarding questions of material sources (provenience), construction and fabrication techniques, and original performance. Ultimately all such data can be utilized to construct new interpretations of human behavior-the decisions that go into building and using structures and space being quite complex at all levels of human interaction from the individual to the community.

Such data are also critical for any conservation intervention and it was in this context that the interdisciplinary research conducted at Mesa Verde involving the documentation, analysis, and conservation of extant architecture was developed.

Early National Park Service brochure cover.

HISTORIOGRAPHY
(PAST RESEARCH)

Watson Smith may be considered the founding father of the modern study of puebloan wall painting and related architectural finishes for the pueblo southwest and the most definitive source on the subject prior to the 1980s. A member of the Peabody Museum (Harvard) Expedition to the Jeddito Valley, Arizona from 1935-39, Smith authored one volume (Report No. 5) of the excavation report, entitled Kiva Mural Decorations at Awatovi and Kawaika-a and published in 1952. Smith's compilation of historiographic, ethnographic, and technical analyses still remain the most complete compilation of information to date, amplified by later art historical studies by J. J. Brody in 1991. During the mid 1930s, several pueblo sites with significant mural painting were discovered in the southwest: Lowry Ruins (Colorado), Kuaua -Coronado (New Mexico) and Awatovi (Arizona). Researchers at all three sites attempted various levels of documentation and preservation and/or removal. Today, only fragments of these murals survive in collections, sadly none remain in situ.

It was in fact the presence and continued tradition of these plain and painted finishes found in ancient and historical contexts which elicited much interest from American explorers of the Southwest territory beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Among the earliest were Lt. James H. Simpson, army topographic engineer and illustrator Richard H. Kern who provided the first reliable and detailed descriptions of kiva wall painting at Jemez Pueblo. The remarkable state of preservation of the "cliff" or alcove structures of southwestern Colorado including their colored plasters, washes, and wall painting, inspired William H. Holmes to comment on the degree of attention in finishing the interiors and exteriors of the buildings. Of W. H. Jackson's "Two-story cliff house", the first such structure to be photographed and presented to the American public, he wrote:

"[The walls] are built in ordinary manner of stone and adobe mortar, and what is rather remarkable are plastered both inside and out. This plaster does not differ greatly from the common mortar, is lightly spread over the walls, probably with the hands, and in color imitates very closely the hues of surrounding cliffs, a pleasing variety of red and yellow grays." (1876-78)

And describing the ruins of the San Juan River Valley:

"Among all dwellers in mud-plastered houses it is the practice to freshen up their habitations by repeated applications of clay, moistened to proper consistency, and spread with the hands, the thickness of the coating depending on its consistency." (1876-78)

SUMMARY OBSERVATIONS

What does the sample survey at Cliff Palace suggest regarding the architectural surface finishes at Mesa Verde:

• Earthen mortars and finishes (plasters and washes) constitute a significant component of the architecture-walls, floors and their construction methods.
• Finishing was an elective, not required architectural component.
• Both interior and exterior spaces were finished with applied plasters and washes.
• The most commonly finished exteriors were the elevations defining an open area or plaza-usually colored red.
• Finishes were used to delineate open and closed space (dados and banding) and openings (auras)-doors and vent holes

• View of Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde, 1998.

  Kivas by far contain more superimposed finishes (sequential campaigns) than any other space: usually 4-6 campaigns as opposed to 1-2 campaigns for rooms.
• Embellishments (wall painting) are found only in interiors, predominantly in kivas, but also in special rooms such as at Spruce Tree House and Room 121, Square Tower at Cliff Palace.
• Kiva schemes tend to become more complex through time, incorporating more elements (dado, banding, aura, embellishments)
• A scheme appears to exist for a period of time, generally becomes gradually sooted, and is then renewed/replaced. Renewal through reapplication is probably tied to ceremonial ritual. In the highly symbolic mural painting of Room 121, evidence of intentional defacement of the embellishments only suggests ritual disempowerment.
• Applied surface finishes can be classified as plasters (> 1mm) and washes (< 1 mm) based on the thickness of the layer and grain size distribution.
• Wall finishes (when applied) are related to masonry construction: shaped and regularly coursed stones have a greater tendency to be finished with washes, rather than applied plasters or extruded smoothed mortars to fill irregular spaces created by irregular stones and uneven joints.
• In kivas, clear distinctions can be observed in the treatment of the essential architectural elements: banquette, pilasters, upper (interpilaster) walls.
  • The banquette is always manipulated to be the smoothest surface either through the careful shaping, dressing, coursing and color washing of the masonry units or the application of a thick leveling coat of plaster or extruded and smoothed mortar (default plaster) on rough masonry. The banquette always has the most finish layers and displays the greatest concentration of incised pictographs.
  • The pilasters are often an extension of the banquette masonry but are often only half finished on their face with plaster or washes. Also the location for individual embellishments such as painted or impressed hand prints, and zoomorphic or anthropomorphic figures.
  • The upper walls are often of coarser construction and not finished
    o Niches are often carefully finished and colored differently-red, white, yellow.
  • The floors and banquette shelves are almost always plastered with a thick 1-2" layer of coarse, shaley mortar with midden debris (bone, charcoal, vegetable fiber)
  • Floors are plastered smooth and are never red in color like the walls

Photographic rendering of conjectural finish scheme based on samples analysis, Kiva Q.

Composition and properties of the finishes:

Clear knowledge of the varying properties of these composite materials which were manipulated for their different uses: granulometry (grain size distribution) for mortars is different (coarser) than for plasters and washes (>% fine sand and silt). This would affect the critical properties of plasticity, adhesion, and shrinkage. It is important to remember that such properties would also have been known in the production of pottery with the same or similar materials.

Color was undoubtedly a major consideration in the choice of clays and clayey soils for surface finishes, more so than for mortars. The predominant material of choice for plaster was the red mesa top loess whose color, clay binder and grain size distribution is ideal for plasters and washes.