See July 5 post. What are they?
Like the circle in the earlier post, this one was in the wrong place and with the wrong doorway opening to be a hogan ring. Its lichened stones were next to the collapsed foundations of a Puebloan fieldhouse, ca. 1300s (my best guess; post-Chaco). But it didn’t have the sunken center typical of a kiva depression, and seemed too small for that as well.
Beautiful potsherds.
Remember to turn potsherds face down again to protect the paint.
From the mesa edge we saw, on a south-facing bench, two Navajo hogan rings and a stone corral, and climbed down to them.
They were old. No historical pottery scatter at all. One of the rings still carried the juniper cribbing of the roof, though it had fallen. In the desert juniper can endure for hundreds of years.
The hogan’s door did not face east as is traditional, because the ring had been built against a sandstone slab; however, the north wall did appear to have been knocked out, customary ritual to release the spirit of a dead person.
The corral had been formed ingeniously by piling cedar to wall up the ends of a cleft formed when a fallen slab split in two.
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WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 