Mar 20Archaeological work on the west side of the Santa Cruz River, to the north and south of West Congress Street, resulted in the documentation of the long history of water management in this area. What has been found? Homer Thiel provides answers. Pre-Contact ditches and canals The oldest irrigation ditch…
Feb 24Homer Thiel discusses the history of maize cultivation in the Tucson Basin. Desert Archaeology's work has been instrumental in documenting some of the earliest agriculture in what is now the United States, as well as tracing the ways different peoples have grown and used the grain through time here. In…
Sep 20For the last ten years, visitors to the Mission Garden, located at the base of Sentinel Peak ("A" Mountain) have watched as fruit trees grow from saplings into tall trees, seen an acequia (canal) built and stocked with an endangered species, viewed crops being harvested and food preparation methods demonstrated.…
Aug 26Desert Archaeology project directors Homer Thiel and Gregory Whitney bring us up to speed on the current archaeological understanding of the ancient peoples who first grew crops in southern Arizona, centuries before the introduction of pottery and the development of the Hohokam culture. The Early Agricultural period is the time…
Sep 17“Old” may only be 30-50 years. That’s still pretty cool. 2,500 years is cooler. Erina Gruner discusses spatial patterns in Tucson Basin early agriculturalist pithouse settlements during the Cienega phase, and what the grouping of houses and burials into “house groups” tells us about mobility, social organization, and land ownership.…
Jul 27Homer Thiel takes a long view of Downtown, detailing the traces of people who lived in the area thousands of years before Europeans arrived in what is now southern Arizona. Hidden beneath the streets, sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings of downtown Tucson are traces of our community's Ancestral Native American…
Aug 3Desert Archaeology project director Erina Gruner’s recent doctoral dissertation explored the exchange of ritual paraphernalia and exotic trade goods during the Chacoan and post-Chacoan periods (AD 875–1300) in the San Juan Basin, Here, she discusses the exchange of abalone shell by groups living in Arizona and New Mexico a thousand years…
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 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…