One holiday morning, several years ago, I turned southeast from Highway 66 at Manuelito, New Mexico, six miles east of the Arizona-New Mexico state line. Nothing was more remote from my mind than archaeology. I was bound for some buttes, visible from the highway, in search of pictures. After driving nearly five miles the trail led around an immense Pueblo III ruin measuring about four hundred by six hundred feet.

It developed that the ruins were known to a few local traders and ranchers and were a matter of record at the Smithsonian Institution to the extent that the area was listed as of archaeological interest though, so far as is known, it had never been intensively investigated by an archaeologist. Dr. F. H. H. Roberts, Jr. and Dr. H. P. Mera had made rough surveys.