There is an abundance of room between the crest of the rim and the base of the terrace for a row of single rooms, inclosing a court within which the main structures stood, or such a court may have been covered, wholly or partly with clusters of rooms, single storied outside, but rising in the center, in two main clusters, three or more stories high.  Such an agglomeration of rooms might under certain conditions produce the result seen here, although a circumscribing heavy wall, occupying the position of the crest of the rim and inclosing two main clusters each rising three or more stories, might also produce this result.  The difficulty with the latter hypothesis is, however, that under it we should expect to find a greater depression between the base of the mounds and the edge of the terrace.  The most reasonable hypothesis, therefore, is that the space between the base of the mounds and the edge of the terrace was occupied by rooms of one story.  This would also help to explain the steepness of the slopes of the mounds themselves.  The walls of the structures they represent, being protected by the adjacent low walls of the one-story rooms, would not suffer appreciably by undermining at the ground level, and if the central room or rooms of each cluster were higher than the surrounding rooms, as is the case in the Casa Grande ruin, the exterior walls, being usually heavier than the inner walls, would be the last to succumb, the clusters would be filled up by the disintegration of the inner walls, and not until the spaces between the low one-story walls surrounding the central cluster were nearly filled up would the pronounced disintegration of the outer walls of the structures commence.  At that period the walls were probably covered and protected by debris dropping from above, and possibly the profile of the mounds was already established, being only slightly modified by surface erosion since.

[Illustration:  Pl.  LII:  Ground Plan of Casa Grande Ruin.]

About the center of the eastern side of the terrace, and also on the western side, the water which falls on the surface of the structure is discharged through rather pronounced depressions at these points.  These depressions are not the work of running water, though doubtless emphasized by that agency, but represent low or open spaces in the original structure, probably passageways or gateways.  Furthermore, before or inside each gateway there is a slightly depressed area, just where we would expect to find it under our hypothesis, and showing that the process of filling in is not yet completed.  If the structure were to remain undisturbed for some decades longer these spaces would doubtless be filled up from material washed from the mounds, giving eventually a continuous slope from the base of the mounds to the edge of the terrace.