Archeology

WHOA! On a dirt road above Nogales, Jim Walker thinks better of urging his rented sedan to ford the Santa Cruz River, unexpectedly swollen by rains across the border in Mexico.

The Man Who Loves Ruins

"We're hard on rental cars," says Mark Michel, founder and director of the Archaeological Conservancy, an association that purchases archeological sites threatened by looting, development, or indifference.

"But we've never lost one," adds Walker, the conservancy's Southwest regional director.

He wishes he could say the same about archeological sites, which are disappearing like runoff in a Sonoran arroyo. Spurred by international art markets in which well-patinaed pots fetch up to $75,000, treasure hunters have interfered with or outright plundered most of the Southwest's once bountiful endowment of prehistoric and historic places.

"We're losing the indigenous cultural patrimony of the United States," Michel laments.

Across the frisky Santa Cruz is one site that stands a better chance of survival, thanks to efforts of the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based conservancy.

It's the remains of Mission Guevavi, Father Eusebio Francisco Kino's first parish church in Arizona, established about 1701 on the Jesuit's epic journey to push northward the "rim of Christendom." (See Arizona Highways, December '90) Guevavi is one of the premier historic sites in the state, a jumping-off point for the whole Europeanization for better or worse of the West. And yet, until very recently, it remained, incredibly, in private hands, grazed by cattle and scoured by men with metal detectors, its future uncertain.

Inspired by the vulnerability of ancient ruins on private land, Mark Michel (ABOVE) formed an organization to rescue the sites without challenging property rights. Among those protected are Father Kino's 18th-century Mission Guevavi, site of the only surviving Spanish Colonial adobe walls (LEFT) built by Jesuits in the United States, and Oak Creek Pueblo (OPPOSITE PAGE), a 14-century Sinagua settlement in the Verde Valley.

It will be able to tell us much more about the past than today's can. If, that is, there are sites left to apply it to.

"In the glory days of archeology, they wanted to excavate every room of every ruin," says Walker. "But the problem is that they didn't always recognize what they were throwing out.

"So you have archeologists in the teens and twenties burning prehistoric beams for firewood because tree-ring dating hadn't been invented yet. A lot of information was lost. The point is, we don't know what's going to be important in the future."

To avoid this rueful hindsight, conservation archeology favors "land-banking" of sites, says Michel, with excavation samplings of 20 percent or less being carried out with current techniques.

Standing on a hillside in the Marana area north of Tucson, it's easy to see the second-biggest threat to archeological preservation: development. A tidal wave of new houses, frozen temporarily by the economic chill, crests in the valley below.

Directly in its path is the outline of a 50-meter oval ball court at the heart of the Hohokam settlement called "Los Morteros," which translates loosely as the place of mortars. Fortunately, that part of the site is owned and protected by the University of Arizona.

In addition, developer Gary Lovelace has donated to the conservancy 36 acres of land too steep to build on. Beneath sentinel-like 150-year-old saguaros is a network of "trincheras," Hohokam terrace structures used for defense and as foundations for houses.

"This is working out very well," says Dr. Paul Fish of the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. "Together we've saved over 150 acres of one of the few well-preserved Hohokam sites in the area. This will make a great park and a great laboratory," he says.

"The lesson here is that development and preservation are compatible," says Walker. "We look for the compromise that will allow both to occur."

Near Cottonwood, overlooking Oak Creek, Margaret Thede lives with her four boisterous dogs on a homestead "as far away from code as you can get." Her father bought the 40-acre property in 1951 from a cowboy named Slim for $100 an acre. The price included the "Indian ruin" on the bluff nearby.

With 35 rooms and 18 cave dwellings in the cliff below, Oak Creek Pueblo is one of only 35 still extant large pueblos dating from the penultimate 14th-century Tuzigoot phase of Sinagua civilization in the Verde Valley.

Archeologists such as Peter Pilles of the Coconino National Forest are especially interested in one unusual feature at Oak Creek: a large depression that may have served as a kiva, a reservoir, or a ceremonial room.

"And Oak Creek's location would seem to make it a critical control point for the whole chain of Tuzigoot pueblos. Maybe the key to their organization lies there," Pilles says.

After her father died, Thede became increasingly concerned about the ruins and her sole responsibility to care for them. At the suggestion of Pilles, she made contact with the conservancy, and a purchase of the two-acre site was agreed upon.

"Because of my personal attachment, it was a hard decision to give up the ruins," she says. "But it was the best thing in a lot of respects. Now I have an organization to call on if something goes wrong. This area is growing really fast, but

The Man Who Loves Ruins

They can protect the site in perpetuity." Thede still serves as the principal site neighbors. Looters and archeologists. Walker says you can tell the difference by the kind of holes each digs: the looters', jagged and random; the archeologists', small and precise, though they often use trenching equipment, as well.

"Archeologists dig like cats; looters, like dogs," he says.

In some ways the distinction is as clear