<< News >> Layers of history found at Tucson AZ mission dig
Submitted by coldrum on Thursday, 26 April 2007 Page Views: 1330
Pre-ColumbianThree weeks of excavation at the Mission San Agustín site uncovered 2,000-year-old arrowheads. They were found a few feet from the first mission-era American Indian home discovered in Tucson, and they were only a few feet away from a 1930s barbecue pit."I can't think of anywhere in the United States where you have this layer cake of cultural change," said Michael Brack, project director at Desert Archaeology, which is conducting the dig.
It's believed the Tucson area ranks as the longest continuously inhabited region in the United States, stretching back for at least 4,000 years. But the site at the west end of Mission Lane presents the first evidence of so many historical eras in one spot going back 2,500 years.
The dig precedes reconstruction of the Mission San Agustín, the centerpiece of Rio Nuevo's Tucson Origins project, in which the mission's adobe convento and chapel should start taking shape in October.
Hundreds of artifacts, from intact 2,000-plus-years-old clay bowls to remnants of a 300-year-old rib dinner, are being removed. The site will be filled in again to preserve the footprints of dozens of structures that vanished hundreds of years ago.
This includes 20 round-pit houses from 2,000 and 2,500 years ago and a small, single-room rectangular house built by an American Indian family a few feet outside the mission wall.
Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of humans living on the dig site at four specific times: the 1930s, the Mission Period from 1690 to 1840, and distinct eras 2,000 and 2,500 years ago. Nobody seemed to live on the 400-by-40-foot patch between 50 A.D. and 1690 because nothing has been found for those 1,640 years except a Hohokam canal.
Brack said evidence shows the 2,500-year-old village was destroyed by fire, while the pithouses from 2,000 years ago were wiped out by a flood. This filled the site with silt, which preserved artifacts and allowed archaeologists to date the village to the time of Christ.
Items found include a pair of perfectly shaped arrowheads, a 2-inch remnant of an antelope hammer head, intact flat clay bowls, and grinding stones. "The arrow points are so close to identical you've got to think the same individual made these arrow points," Brack said.
For more see the story at the Tucson Citizen and the Center for Desert Archaeology website. The last remaining ruins of the 1600's mission buildings were destroyed and the archaeological evidence of prehistoic structures has been protected by a spoil dump since the 1950's.
Note: Reconstruction of Tuscon AZ Spanish Colonial Mission begins with dig finds going back 2,500 years.
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