FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

From Humble From Humble Beginnings Beginnings

A group of students who are participating in the Old Pueblo Educational Neighborhood program study a model Hohokam pithouse to understand how it was built.

ALLEN DART’S WEEKEND ARCHAEOLOGY PROJECTS HAVE EVOLVED INTO THE OLD PUEBLO ARCHAEOLOGY CENTER.

BY NANCY TRAVER

Archaeologist Allen Dart bought a house southwest of Tucson in 1987.He noticed a number of archaeological sites in the area,and in his spare time he began to record these sites.

Word spread. Soon,people began approaching Dart to ask if they could help.“I realized people were just hungry to dig and to learn about excavating,” he said.

He developed a core of volunteers,and soon his following grew so large that Dart formed a nonprofit organization to obtain grants to do more work and create more opportunities for volunteers.That was 1994,the date the Old Pueblo Archaeology Center was born.“I was continually barraged with requests from people to dig,” said Dart, who became the center’s executive director.“I set up the

Allen Dart leans on the water holding tank that the Aguirre family used for irrigation between 1895 and 1940 at the Bojórquez-Aguirre Ranch site.

Old Pueblo Archaeology Center to enable people to dig.”

Operating out of an office building in midtown Tucson, Dart’s organization now boasts an annual budget of $400,000,a crew of 100 volunteers,and seven paid staff.The center contains a laboratory, storage areas for artifacts and documents,and a library. It has awarded $24,000 in scholarships over the past year so needy children and students can take part in its education programs. Over the past 18 months it has also given some 4,400 amateur archaeologists excavating experience.

Old Pueblo has also been instrumental in arranging donations of significant archaeological sites in Arizona to The Archaeological Conservancy for preservation.Old Pueblo convinced developers to donate the Madera Reserve and Santa Rita Springs preserves in Green Valley and the Dairy site in Marana.

Teaching Archaeology Teaching Archaeology

Educating the public about the cultures and peoples of the Southwest is the organization’s main goal,according to educational project director Eric Kaldahl.In 1995,Old Pueblo launched its first public archaeological field school at the Sabino Canyon Ruin,which lies on public and private land northeast of Tucson.The field school was conducted in cooperation with the Fenster School,which owns some of the Sabino Canyon property.Fenster’s administrators wanted their students to participate in an excavation on this property.“Shortly after we founded that, we started getting calls from other teachers asking us to offer something similar to their students,” said Dart.

This led to the Old Pueblo Educational Neighborhood (OPEN) program,which allows adults and children as young as eight to excavate a model of an ancient archaeological site.The site,which is 25 feet by 40 feet,is a replica of a southern Arizona Hohokam Indian village that includes full-size prehistoric pithouses.It is salted with pot sherds,stone tools,seashell jewelry, and animal bones, some of them loaned by the Arizona State Museum.The participants screen excavated material in search of artifacts,record their findings,catalog artifacts,and interpret their finds.

OPEN offers scholarships to impoverished school districts in Arizona.Students,at a ratio of four to one,

work under the supervision of a staff member.“We figure it costs about $25 per kid per hour to run this program,” Kaldahl said.The program is supported by grants from the Arizona Humanities Council and other organizations and individuals.

Steve Stacey, a member of Old Pueblo’s board of directors and a volunteer at the center, said working with the students is rewarding. He recounted a recent dig in which 16 teenagers identified by their school district as at-risk youths came to the center.“They started out being bored,kicking the dirt,acting very macho,” Stacey recalled.“We explained to them that the floor we were digging up might have been put here 800 years ago,and we’re destroying it by excavating.Everything we do wrecks the past.”

Upon learning this,the students began to take interest in the dig.“They changed their attitudes,” Stacey observed, “and that’s worth all the money in the world.”

Excavating often stimulates the students’desire to learn,he said.They realize they have to learn math in order to become archaeologists.“Suddenly, instead of getting Fs in math,they started getting Bs and Cs,” he said.

An Ambitious Project An Ambitious Project

Old Pueblo is teaming up with the Town of Marana to develop a cultural heritage exhibit and education program in a regional park that the town is developing.Old Pueblo will focus on the Yuma Wash and BojórquezAguirre Ranch sites,which are roughly 11 miles northwest of Tucson’s center.

This project was launched after two parcels of land were donated to the town by two real estate developers, according to Farhad Moghimi,director of public works in Marana.Because the Yuma Wash and Bojórquez-Aguirre sites were on the developers’ land,they would have had to pay for excavation and data recovery. “They saw it as a major constraint for them,so instead,they donated the land to the town,”Moghimi said.“We had had Old Pueblo do some work for us in the past,so we started talking about building a park there.”

The town contracted in 1999 with Old Pueblo to do some preliminary excavation at the site.“The more we learned about the site from Old Pueblo,the more excited we got,” he explained.

Old Pueblo issued a preliminary report estimating that the site,which it calls Yuma Wash,includes over 100 prehistoric house ruins.The area was home to a large Hohokam settlement, established some time after A.D. 750 and abandoned after A.D. 1325.The ruins there include partly underground pithouses and above-ground pueblolike homes,plus thousands of prehistoric artifacts.

Dart said,“Old Pueblo’s first Yuma Wash investigations demonstrated just how special a site this is.” Hohokam pithouses of the type found at the site were common,but there are also small above-ground adobe roomblocks containing unusually large amounts of red, black,and white Salado-style pottery.The Salado culture’s heartland is 100 miles north of the Tucson area,he said.The Salado-style ceramics and the roomblock architecture suggest that the people who constructed these roomblocks were immigrants.This hypothesis has been drawn at very few other sites in the greater Tucson area that contain roomblocks. Yuma Wash is also the westernmost site in the Tucson

These sherds of bottle glass and other artifacts are also from the Aguirre family occupation. Dart holds a piece of glass with an iridescent blue patina.

Students discover artifacts by pouring excavated material through sifting screens at Old Pueblo’s mock dig site.

Basin where Mogollon-style indented corrugated pottery has been found.

The remains of the ranch, founded in 1878 by Juan and María Bojórquez,have also been identified.Another rancher,Feliberto Aguirre, acquired title to the property in 1900.Vestiges of Bojórquez and Aguirre’s buildings and a stone-masonry water tank remain.

Rather than hire archaeologists to excavate Yuma Wash,Marana officials decided that the site should be used to educate the public about the town’s cultural heritage.A very small portion of the site will be excavated over the next five years,and Old Pueblo will provide professional archaeologists to instruct teachers,students,and amateur archaeologists in the proper methods of excavation and interpretation.The rest of the site will be preserved for future research.

By the time the park is completed in 2007,it will include a community center that will showcase exhibits of Marana’s history, including artifacts and features discovered by the excavation.Athletic fields,benches,and equestrian trails are being developed around the archaeological sites as the excavations proceed.The park will also offer guided tours once the excavation is finished.An amphitheater, picnic area,library, and river walk trails are also included in the park’s master plan.

Marana expects to pay over $400,000 over the next five years for the excavation, analysis, and storage of artifacts at the Arizona State Museum.“It will be a win-win situation,” Moghimi said.“People will get a chance to dig and the town will have a wonderful park.”

“I think Old Pueblo is filling a void,” said Emory Sekaquaptewa,a Hopi Indian and the president of Old Pueblo’s board of directors. Sekaquaptewa is believed to be one of the first Native Americans to head the board of a nonprofit archaeological group.“Generally, the public has always seen archaeologists as highly specialized people,removed from the community, who are simply looking for artifacts to exhibit. People think what they do is not directly connected to the present world.”

Old Pueblo not only brings archaeology to lay people, he added,it also involves lay people in the discovery of the past.“There is an unbroken connection from our prehistoric past to the present,” said Sekaquaptewa. “Old Pueblo is making the past more real.”

NANCY TRAVER is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Time, People, and other publications.