Marana Project Digs Volunteers

Article from Tucson Newspapers Inc. “Senior Scene” insert, February 16, 2001:

Southern Arizona A.D.1250 was not so very different from other inhabited countryside before automobiles changed everything — scatterings of crossroads villages, each with its own little church or school — except for one more important village that had something like a cathedral. That would have been Marana.

Archaeologists have been poking around the Southwest for 120-plus years, and still some of our prehistoric ruins seem just as mysterious as they were when the 20th century dawned. This could change soon. The National Science Foundation recently granted $250,000 to Arizona State Museum for intensive research over three years at a tantalizing, Classic Period Hohokam settlement in Marana. This multi-featured site (AD 1150-1300) and surrounding remains north of Tucson already have inspired about 100 learned papers and 20 graduate students’ theses.

Paul and Suzanne Fish, archaeologists at the University of Arizona, have been studying the organization of Hohokam farming communities since 1981. One of their well-known interests is the prehistoric cultivation of agave as a crop and all the known uses of the plant. Rock beds that served as mulches to nourish clusters of agave are one kind of feature that helps to explain what was going on at Marana several centuries ago. But agriculture seems to have been only a part of the economy at this location, where previous investigations have given testimony to a variety of ritual, political, manufacturing and trade activities.

Platform Mound

The people who lived here 800 years ago are thought to have been an advanced society, with dense populations living in villages on the Gila, Salt, San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers. The largest prehistoric canal system north of Peru is located in the Phoenix basin. Mexican-style, ritual, I-shaped ball courts have been identified at some earlier sites. About 50 later communities have been found arranged around another type of public architecture, the Platform Mound, such as the one that gives status to the Marana site.

“Of thousands of identified ruins of Hohokam communities throughout southern Arizona, the Marana site stands out as ideal for study of roles and relationships of the society. It is relatively undisturbed, with no overlays of modern agriculture or urbanization,” Suzanne Fish says.