It is not often an archeologist has an opportunity to uncover spectacular remains of this sort, but these are only two of the fascinating burials which Morris recovered from the Aztec ruins. In all he found 186 interments. Strangely enough, only 6, with possibly 2 others, could be identified as belonging to the Chacoan phase at Aztec; 149 were definitely of the Mesa Verde period, 12 others probably so, and 17 were found in circumstances which made it impossible to tell to which period they belonged.
But burials were not the only things which Morris uncovered. He began his diggings in the southeast corner of the ruin, excavating the entire east wing from south to north. The problem of moving the dirt, debris, and fallen rocks was considerable, especially when he did not want merely to pile it off to one side where he might subsequently have to move it a second time. Furthermore, the ruin was to be stabilized as a permanent monument, so it was necessary to remove the debris well outside the ruin area. At one time he evidently considered building a sluiceway from an irrigation ditch which runs along a higher level on the north side of the ruin, thinking that most of the debris could be dumped in the sluice box and washed out to a lower area by the river. Perhaps this scheme did not prove to be feasible, for instead, during the first season's excavations, he constructed a narrow-gage tramway on which the workmen ran dump cars. Unfortunately, this method of dirt removal did not work satisfactorily either, because the relatively light rails which were used would not support the weight of the loaded dump trucks. He also had difficulty with the size and quality of the wheels on the dumpcarts. Although excavators elsewhere have sometimes used this method of removing dirt, it frequently presents its own type of engineering problems. In the remaining years of the work at Aztec, Morris employed horse-drawn carts which could be loaded directly from the excavations and hauled to a vacant area to be dumped.
[Illustration: Early "diggings" at Aztec Ruins.]
In many places the digging was extremely laborious, for over the centuries the dirt and debris had been packed into a consistency almost like that of concrete. In other places the rooms were full of all sorts of prehistoric rubbish, intermixed with broken artifacts which had to be carefully sorted out. In describing the excavations in one room Morris said: