its fruit is unpalatable, but several finger rings made of its hooked red spines were found in the cliff dwelling. Recent desert Indians sometimes made cooking pots of the barrel: they cut off its top and removed some of the pulp from the stump, then put food in the cavity and dropped in hot stones to cook it.

4 TESAJO (tess-AH-hoe). Tiny edible tomato-red fruits, ready in November and December, give this little member of the cholla (CHOY-ya) cactus group its other name: Christmas cactus.

5 YUCCA (YUH-ca). This very useful plant provides many things. Leaf fibers make strong thread for mats, string, rope, sandals, nets and snares; the buds, flowers, fruit, stalks and seeds are edible. The root contains saponin, useful as a medicine or as soap or an excellent shampoo. Sharp leaf tips make good awls.

Yucca

A prehistoric sandal woven of loosely spun yucca fiber.

Mesquite leaves and beans

6 MESQUITE. Pods and beans of the mesquite (mes-KEET), nutritious and sweet, are still an important part of the desert Indian’s diet. Pods are ground into flour and pressed to make little loaves of staple bread. Fermented, the same flour makes an intoxicating drink. The sweet sap of the tree can be used to make candy, black dye, or even glue for broken pottery.

Mesquite has invaded vast areas during the past century, areas once desert grasslands. Cattle, grazing this land since the 1870s, have eaten away the grasses, encouraging growth of woody species like mesquite. The sweet mesquite pods are a favorite cattle food, and the beans pass unharmed through the digestive tract to be deposited far and wide. A natural cycle of drought and erosion coupled with heavy grazing has destroyed much of the desert grassland and converted it to mesquite. With loss of the grasses, erosion has accelerated, springs have dried up, and formerly sandy and smooth canyon floors (once suitable for small-scale farming) have eroded to boulder-strewn wastes. In less than a century we have made drastic changes in the desert, changes whose consequences we are only beginning to see.

7 SOTOL. Mats, sandals, coarse ropes and other household items can be made of the fibers in the narrow leaves of this plant. Young flower stalks of sotol (SO-tall) are edible when roasted; many deep stone-lined roasting pits are found throughout this area.

Sotol leaf and fruiting stem.

8 LICHENS (LIE-kens). The green and orange blotches resembling paint on this boulder are lichens, plants consisting of an alga and a fungus living together. As the plants grow, their secretions begin dissolving solid rock into fragments, the first step in the long natural process of soil formation. It has been estimated that in the desert it takes 1,000 years to develop one inch of topsoil.

9 OCOTILLO (oh-ko-TEE-yo). This thorny member of the candlewood family (NOT a cactus!) has handsome orange-red flowers at the ends of each branch in spring. Orioles