It is difficult to suggest how many of the cliff dwellings fall into the 51-to-100-room group. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, as has been suggested, it is difficult to count the rooms in an unexcavated ruin. What was once a large ruin may be little more than a mass of fallen stones. Evidences of upper stories often have disappeared entirely. If one enters a cave and counts the rooms that are in evidence it is usually safe to assume that many more have disappeared completely.

Another difficulty is that little of the Mesa Verde has been explored in modern times. The remote parts of the mesa, over half of which is Ute Indian Reservation, have had little exploration since the days of the cowboys. Hundreds of the ruins have not been entered in modern times. It is doubtful if any living person has been in one hundred of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings. Distant views have been had of a great many but only a small number in the more accessible areas have been entered.

Thus it is difficult to estimate the number of ruins that contained from 51 to 100 rooms. Probably there were a dozen—perhaps there were twice that many. A more definite answer must await further exploration.

In this discussion of the large ruins one thing becomes evident. Only a small portion of the people lived in the larger villages. The bulk of the population was in the smaller villages, of which there were several hundred.