ARIZONIQUES

A Guide to Places, Events, and People EXCAVATING ELDEN PUEBLO

Tucked between U.S. Route 89 and a trailer park on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Elden Pueblo, a village occupied seven centuries ago by the Sinagua culture, sits in a partially excavated condition. The ruin serves as a public archeology project overseen by Peter J. Pilles, Jr., of the Coconino National Forest and members of the educational staff of the Museum of Northern Arizona. It offers opportunities to laymen willing to spend from a single day to two weeks working beside professionals to uncover Arizona's ancient past. Originally excavated in 1926, the

Unique to Arizona and the Southwest. ARIZONIQUES COURTHOUSE TRANSFORMATION

site served as the impetus for the founding of the museum. Flagstaff residents cringed as they watched hundreds of beautiful artifacts being shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution, and reacted by forming the local Museum Foundation as a repository for pieces of the area's prehistory.

Since 1978, when re-excavation began, volunteers have been working to restore the ruin. Opportunities to take part are expanding this year with programs planned for schoolchildren, families, and serious amateurs.

For a schedule of programs and a list of nearby accommodations, write to Ann Walka, Director of Education, Museum of Northern Arizona, Rt. 4, Box 720, Flagstaff, AZ 86001.

On the third floor of the Cobre Valley Center for the Arts, Superior Court judges once deliberated matters civil and criminal. For the new arts center in Globe, Arizona, occupies the old Gila County Courthouse at the corner of Broad and Oak streets.

"It's appropriate," remarks Bob Hutchinson, manager of the Downtown Action Program. "Back in the 1930s, when nobody had any money, everyone in town would come to the courtroom and listen to trials as a form of entertainment."

For information on events, activities, and hours at the Cobre Valley Center for the Arts, telephone Hutchinson at 425-9340.

BUGGING TUCSON

One day last fall, fire ants invaded a new Tucson museum. They were welcomed.

The museum is Sonoran Arthropod Studies, Inc., a nonprofit center for the study, exhibition, and elucidation of the bug world. One morning museum workers arrived to find a line of Solenopsis xyloni marching into the wasps' exhibit and stealing food. Rather than destroying them, the staff supplied the ants with glass cages, their own food, and a path to their nest outside. It was a lesson in creative coexistence.

SASI is the creation of Steve Prchal, a self-educated entomologist who worries about our attitudes toward insects and arachnidswhich, along with tasty crustaceans, compose the phylum Arthropoda. "Kids start out with a natural interest in arthropods," Prchal says. "They develop negative attitudes after they bring a bug into the house and an adult says, 'Get that thing out of here!' We're trying to do the opposite with this museum. As people acquire appreciation and respect for arthropods' roles in the world, they develop an improved environmental and conservation ethic."

SASI currently offers a dozen exhibits of live insects and educational projects. This is just the museum's larval stage. Prchal plans to move his new enterprise to the Tucson Mountains. There it will also have a garden designed to facilitate visitors' observation of plants, insects, spiders, and birds in their interdependent relationships of breeding, preying, and pollinating.

Museum membership is $15 a year. Write to Box 5624, Tucson, AZ 85703, or telephone (602) 884-7274. The museum, now located at 2437 Ν. Stone Ave., is open noon to 5 P.M., Thursday through Saturday.

PSEUDO SAGUAROS

Don't be misled by tourist brochures and Hollywood Westerns that sprinkle saguaros through New Mexico, California, and Texas. The giant cactus that bears Arizona's state flower is unique to the Sonoran Desert and, with very few exceptions, grows nowhere but in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

The reason? Temperature, mostly. As a subtropical plant, freezing temperatures are the saguaro's greatest natural enemy. These thorny giants can't survive at higher elevations, preferring the warm desert.

The saguaro's range extends from the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman in the north, to the Gila Mountains of Graham County on the east, to the Cerro Masaica of Sonora in the south. Only on the western fringe of their range do saguaros creep outside the Arizona and Sonora habitat. There, along the Colorado River and in the Whipple Mountains southwest of Lake Havasu, a few wayward saguaros survive in California.

JUNE CALENDAR

June 4 and 5, Prescott. Territorial Days and Folk Art Fair. The celebrated Sharlot Hall Museum presents the 15th annual gathering of weavers, spinners, soapmakers, horseshoers, and other old-time crafts specialists. Telephone 445-3122.

June 17 through 19, Flagstaff. Pine Country Rodeo. Top competitors of the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association fill the Fort Tuthill rodeo grounds with three days of actionpacked Western entertainment. Telephone 774-4505.

June 24 through August 4, Flagstaff. The Coconino Center for the Arts hosts the annual Native American Arts Invitational Exhibition, presenting the finest in Indian arts. The opening weekend features Native American cooking, crafts market, traditional dances, poetry, and music. Telephone 779-6921.

June 25 and 26, Page. The sixth annual Indian Market and Pow Wow features more than 150 artists and their works, traditional costumes and dances, native foods, plus a number of stars of network television. Companion events include a mountain man rendezvous June 24, 25, and 26, and a chili cookoff June 26. Telephone (602) 645-2404 or (818) 508-1706.

June 25 and 26, Payson. Country Music Festival. Outstanding fiddlers, pickers, and buck dancers from all over the Southwest perform beneath the pines. Telephone 474-4515.