(April 6, 2020)—On March 5, I went up to the Huhugam Ki Museum at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and helped Museum Director Gary Owens and his crew do some fix-up work on their historic ki (house) replica. In this picture you can see it is looking a bit weathered but in good overall shape.
Work on its construction took place in the fall of 2017, and we did some maintenance about a year ago, as well.
Upon entering the structure, I could see that the interior was in really good shape—except for massive piles of gopher backdirt. That jar was almost completely buried; in this photo I had pulled it out. We removed four wheelbarrow loads of dirt. This shows how fast ancient structures could have filled up after people had moved on.
We inserted a new layer of arrow weed stalks into the walls and roof. The green is the fresh arrow weed. It really made the house look nice.
We made more mud, glorious mud!
We then applied mud to some of the roof edges, the berm, and the berm on the inside of the house.
We even made a new door that’s almost finished up here. We wanted to have the house ready for the annual Tortilla Festival, which was supposed to be held on March 21, but had to be canceled.
