Southwest Archaeology Today for Jan 29, 2007

Archaeology Making the News – A Service of the Center for Desert Archaeology

Rockslide at Mesa Verde Damages Square Tower House Ruin: Something looked different at the popular Square Tower House at Mesa Verde National Park when research archaeologist Julie Bell took visitors by the most photographed site at the park recently. There was rubble where rubble should not be. A 4.5-ton slab fell on the picturesque ruin sometime last month, smashing a storage room, rupturing the wall of a kiva and coming to rest inside a two-story room at the far end of the site.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/dth2 – Cortez Journal

– Small Pueblo Found in Albuquerque Bosque: The ruins of what appears to have been a seven- to ten-room, 700-year-old pueblo have been discovered in the bosque on Albuquerque’s Westside. The find was announced through a press release issued by the private Bosque School. The site is on the school’s property. The release says that the school’s construction manager discovered shards of what appeared to be Native American potsherds while he was working on a drainage ditch in January.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/1i2x – KOBTV

– Copper Mining Tourism: Arizona’s biggest tourist attraction is a hole in the ground. But the Grand Canyon isn’t the only hole worth looking into. There are others, including the big dig in the eastern part of the state, just a few miles from the New Mexico state line. It is a hole where copper is scratched out of what used to be a mountain. The Morenci Mine in remote Greenlee County is one of the biggest open-pit copper mines in the world. With a hole five miles wide, it dwarfs its surrounding mountains, some of which have succumbed to the pit’s steady growth over the seven decades of its existence.
http://www.cdarc.org/page/jkzg – Arizona Republic

– Urban Development in Coolidge Edges Closer to the Casa Grande: As a boy, Raymond Deazey hunted rattlesnakes and picked up arrowheads in the desert around the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. “It was all vacant, and we used to ride our motorcycles and all that stuff through here,” the native said. Now 49, Deazey returned to his former stomping grounds recently – to visit the dentist. The dentist’s office is in a growing commercial zone directly across from the entrance to the monument, site of a 700-year-old structure called the “Great House.”
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/39953.php

– Waldo Wilcox, the “Celebrity Curmudgeon” of the Range Creek Complex: The big metal gates that kept the world out of Waldo Wilcox’s Range Creek Canyon cattle ranch for 50 years are now locked against him. “If they don’t want me there, it’s their right,” the 76-year-old Wilcox says of state officials and archaeologists. “They bought it. When I owned it, I changed the locks to keep people out too.” Wilcox is the celebrity curmudgeon of eastern Utah – a man who sold his remote 4,200-acre spread to the state in 2001 for $2.5 million and revealed to the world a treasure trove of hundreds of largely undisturbed ancient Indian sites.
http://test.denverpost.com/news/ci_5099123