Arizona State University - Sun Devil Spark / Sahuaro Yearbook (Tempe, AZ)

Page 18 text:

5 Some artifacts have been carried away by the kids who live nearby, who consider Mesa Grande mostly just as a nice playground, but who are vaguely aware of its history. 12-Mesa Grande Site 'i ' .s .mi , 1 W Ls 'Hi gathers a group of the bikers together at the top of the mound and tries to persuade them to ride elsewhere. Some artifacts have been carried away by the kids who live nearby, who consider Mesa Grande mostly just a nice playground, but who are vaguely aware of its history. The cowboys and Indians used to fight here, declares one ten-year-old boy, who adds that his parents don't know about the site. Clt is not in a very prominent position and is not well known, al- though it is within the city limits and easily accessible? Mesa Grande is now so dominated by' modern culture that it is hard to imagine Indians living there over 1500 . vw ' B .' 1 S H Q e years ago. Newspapers not even yellow adorn it now, with cigarette packages brand- ishing the latest government tar and nicotine figures. Modern farming and con- struction surround it, huge 747 jets soar above it on their way in and out of Sky Harbor Air- port. Such jets can take you nearly anywhere nowadays, they can't take you back in time. Only archaeologists can. So the students ignore the jets and the motorcycles and dig into the past, while pieces of their surveying equipment lean against the trucks like crutches for them to hobble away on after a back-breaking Saturday at Mesa Grande.

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fubokn--.. .. Q- Vg l .Q Bruce and I went to the Mesa Grande site with the photographer. My curiousity was piqued by Richard's article, which, I realized, was more poet's observations than journalism. But, once there, l realized how overwhelming the mood of the place is. We wandered around a bit, looking into the holes of chipping, dusty people, and feeling quite amateurish and intruding. Then, our meanderings led us back over the hill and into Sonny Cockrell, who, pre-warned of our visit, preceeded to give us the grand tour. Mesa Grande is really an embryonic site, mostly covered with the packed-dust, yellow topsoil typical in desert climates. Yet, under the tutelage of Sonny, the dusty hills and enigmatic bumps in the earth took on a new meaning. He walked along one buckled ridge of land and called it the wall of a village compound, looked back over the enclosure and described the little cluster of rectangular dwellings that huddled against the protecting wall leaving room for ball courts and meeting areas in the center. Sonny picked up pieces of stone, showed their sharpened edges and called them tools, he chose heavier samples of a porous substance and demonstrated how metates are used to grind corn even now by some Indian tribes. A babbling rivelet of water nearby marked a canal centuries old, now used by the Salt River Project. He was fascinating, and I felt the overwhelming desire to enroll in an Anthropology program and join this amazing group of dedicated, sweating dreamers. We walked back through the site over dust feet and centuries away from an old race of people who played games and cooked food in little fireplaces in the doorways of their homes, who knew magnetism and the true north and invented a calender better than lulian's, who were akin to the Aztecs and who knew how to survive in this frightful dry place. And who were long gone. We went back to the car and the air-conditioning chilled our sweating bodies as we drove away. CSM Mesa Grande Site-13