TUZIGOOT NATIONAL MONUMENT

"ONE OF THE THINGS I find interesting about this place is a human history that, every day, surrounds you,” says Skip Larson of Tuzigoot, which protects a Sinaguan pueblo village that so exemplifies its era that the period is called the Tuzigoot Phase. “Every day, you have a connection to the history,” the park guide says. That history includes homesteaders, miners and Native Americans, whose descendants show up on a regular basis with information that illuminates the past. “The prehistory we have everywhere, but very few places have a continuity,” Larson says. One fact Larson finds telling is that the crews working on the excavation were segregated as they were for mining operations, with separate crews, foremen and living quarters for Anglos, Mexicans and Apaches, who lived in wickiups on the far side of the river. Every new story, Larson says, “adds a thread to the tapestry of the area.”