Arizona Al took me on a field trip to one of his local ancient haunts.
It's about 2000 feet over the river seen in the bottom of the canyon...Rocks on the right is one wall of the site, about 5 feet thick. .



Al checking out the inner rooms structure..



Can you see that rock art up there ?



One of many different glyphs around the site. .



In that area they were long on pottery and short on flint !



As Al points out, howcum the ancients could use paints that lasted hundreds to THOUSANDS of years and
modern man has to repaint his house every 20 years.. .



EVERY plant in AZ has thorns, no less than TX. Al kept mumbling about how the site location was on the top of a volcano, , ,what did they do for water ??

Looks like you had some good weather there Hal. Blue skies and short sleeve shirts. That was worth a trip by itself.
How hard was it to get up to the dwellings?

Did Al indicate what culture had occupied the site? Neat Place!

Hal when i die, i want to come back and be just like you!
You get to travel, dig and make all the shows, what a life! Are those sites not protected? One would think that all those pottery shards would of been picked up by archeologist long ago or protected by law?

Nate, Not sure of the range. We were south of flagstaff. As tour guide, Al just said, " get out here"

Te, Winter in AZ is definitely the advisable time to be exploring. ALL plants have thorns so its never a straight line in climbing then mix that with a very sheer area where the climable areas are thorn covered its pretty bad. I'm told in the full sun 140* temp of summer, asside from more nasty vegitation, in climing on bare rock you can actually wind up with burn blisters from touching baked rock.

Al says some sites are almost inacessable to the casual visitor. The ancients had reasonable sized tree trunks notched for ladders and these are certainly gone now.

MW, Sorry to say I really cant remember the name of the peoples that were identified with this particular site. The pottery is a well studied marker in all of Az so they could be fairly confident in identification. Stone tools were at a minimum so it must be a bit tougher on the Arizona archaeologists.

RG, AZ is a whole different country from TX. . .About 60% of the land is fully accessable to the public. Just park your car and step over any fences. Federal forests naturally have the same rules as Tx but a huge part of the lands are BLM. Game hunting, mineral prospecting and surface hunting ancient sites is completely permitted. Prospecting needs a bit of scratching the ground but ZERO digging is permitted on any area that qualifies as an ancient site. Pottery shard collecting is a statewide hobby.

You are right Nate. Most of the stuff is protected by law. I don't know anyone here who takes the time to carry the stuff out. There are sites where there is more pottery on the ground then rocks, making the stuff not worth picking up. It does make for some good picture taking though. Unlike Texas, here, even on private land there seems to be no interest in taking the stuff home. If one wants a few nice pieces one only needs to walk around a new housing site and pick the stuff up when they are digging in the sewer lines.I worked for a archaeological group here for a few years digging sites for the state highway dept. Once we were done the state would bring in the heavy equipment and dig down ten feet to put in the new road bed leaving pills of dirt ten feet high with thousands of artifacts in them. Some of the neighbors would come over and the boss would tell them that the stuff moved by heavy equipment had on historical value and that they could have them. Once the job is done the artifacts just lay in the ditch forever.