Apr 8Historical archaeologist Homer Thiel provided information for a newspaper article on the 1918 Spanish flu, published by the Arizona Daily Star on April 6, 2020. This blog entry is an expanded presentation of Homer's research on the history of epidemics in the Tucson area. The appearance of the COVID-19 virus…
Feb 21Homer Thiel explores what documents and artifacts tell us about the the lives of the Spanish and Mexican soldiers who were garrisoned at the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson between 1775 and 1856. On August 20th, 1775, Hugo O'Conor, an Irishman employed by the Spanish military, selected the location of…
Jan 24Desert Archaeology zooarchaeologist Jenny Waters and historical archaeologist Homer Thiel talk about how archaeologists use animal bone to explore the meats eaten by people in the past. There were probably few, if any, vegans or vegetarians in southern Arizona during the pre-contact, Spanish, Mexican, or American Territorial periods. People hunted…
Nov 25Historical archaeologist Homer Thiel opens up the Desert Archaeology archives for a look back at a project in historical downtown Phoenix that touched on public utilities, re-purposing Hohokam infrastructure, and daily household life in the late 1800s. Plans for a new United States Federal Courthouse in Phoenix led to testing…
Sep 10Desert Archaeology has conducted numerous excavations at the Early Agricultural period Clearwater site, located west of downtown Tucson at the base of A-Mountain. A team led by Homer Thiel returned in the spring of 2018 to the portion of the site near Avenida del Convento in advance of the new…
Jul 15Jim Heidke, Desert Archaeology’s senior ceramic analyst, explores the clay figurines made by the earliest farmers in the Tucson Basin. At once recognizable and enigmatic, these small artifacts played an important but as-yet incompletely understood role in the lives of the Tucson Basin’s earliest farmers. Since 1986, Desert Archaeology and…
Jun 13Homer Thiel details some of the history and artifacts connected to the Catholic Church in Tucson. In the mid-1690s, an Italian-born Jesuit priest, Father Francisco Eusebio Kino, set out from his mission in Dolores, Sonora, heading north into what is now southern Arizona. Kino was seeking to convert the local…
Jun 7Homer Thiel explores how people living in the ancient Tucson Basin stored their food and goods before the advent of closets and SnapWare. The featured image above is from Rob Ciaccio’s reconstruction of lifeways at Honey Bee Village (see the link at end of this post). Recently a movement has…
Feb 8Desert Archaeology's ground stone analysts, Dr. Jenny Adams and Tessa Branyan, discuss a rare Early Agricultural period artifact type. What do the Las Capas, Los Pozos, Santa Cruz Bend, and Clearwater sites have in common, besides the fact that people lived in these settlements along the Santa Cruz River during…
Feb 5Historical archaeologist Homer Thiel takes us on a home tour of 18th- and 19th-century Presidio households. Tucson was a Spanish and then Mexican fortress from its establishment in 1775 until the last Mexican soldiers marched away in March 1856. During this 81-year time span, the average population numbered between 400…