The continuing story I want to convey here is not just the history of that “paint” mine in particular, however.
There is a deeper side to it. – the real theme is how wrong, or at best, simply misunderstood, our perception of the past is.
The narrow, “locked in” view of “how it was” is very often incomplete when examining the record of human history.
Bringing that history to life is what is necessary. Dusty, old ruins merely tell part of the tale. The relationship between all those sets of ruins is something else – indeed, it is the very fabric of that old society, and, by virtue of human descent, of us.
In a previous GeoStory ™ (“The Turquoise Traders”), I wrote about the “Village of the Scorpions”, a place where ancients had mined and crafted turquoise for a period of some 800 years. It sits along a onetime trade route that extended from a Hohokam city we now call Snaketown (near the present-day Gila River bridge, on I-10, southeast of Phoenix) into western and central Mexico. The village was then, and is now, clearly “in the middle of nowhere”.
But it was next to a place where copper minerals occurred, and those inhabiting the region around 1700 years ago had already recognized those minerals by their brilliant blue and green colors. One type of pretty rock found there was turquoise, the most desirable of the ornamental copper minerals.
When I wrote that piece, I had not yet visited the actual village site. Few people had ever even heard about it, and references to its precise location were almost nonexistent.
It took two trips into the blazing desert, a lot of map interpretation, various wanderings around through the scrubby landscape, numerous vicious little bites from gnats and other insects, what seemed like hundreds of “stickers” in my legs, and the braving of encounters with both the US Border Patrol (friendly), and people-smuggling “coyotes” (who roared by in a pickup truck packed with humans, not really in a mood to talk), but I finally found it.
I think by then, my good friend, who had accompanied me on both of these desert excursions, was probably wondering about me and my obsession with the place. But for me, having only read about it was not enough. I had to actually see the spot, feel the desert, and experience the place. I had to bring it to life.
The Village of the Scorpions (its present-day Indian name) is now a series of shallow ditches and low piles of dirt and rock, sitting on a gentle ridge offering sweeping, lonely views to the north and south.
Where miners and artisans, along with their families, had once lived and died over a period of eight centuries, now lay only desolation and the quick work of some archaeological crews in the last decades. The remains of a pit house could be seen in one spot, a few stone piles in others, and there were a few pieces of blue turquoise scattered about.
The archaeologists had done their job well. And it’s a good thing, too, for without their detailed work and documentation, the place would have been obliterated by present-day mining activity, and we would have never known the detail of what took place there, and just how that little village had fit into a far-ranging trade network.
As I stood there in the heat of the day for what seemed like a long time, I imagined I could barely make out a small trading caravan in the distance, headed for whatever-they-called-Snaketown then, bearing a load of bright blue stones and carvings.
I suggested to my friend (who had been with me at the “pigment” mine also) that we were probably among a few living humans – maybe we were the only two – that had actually been to both of these two old contemporary mining villages of the prehistoric Southwest.
I noted that we had quite possibly retraced the footsteps, so to speak, over a few trips, of a couple of ancient Hohokam traders – us finding one old mine by accident, the other after a lot of research and driving. We were, in a way, reliving their adventures, and at the same time, creating some of our own.
The point? You can’t relate to the experiences of our predecessors simply by reading about them. You should go there, stand in that place, imagine and feel what those that lived, worked, and died there felt.
Bring it to life for yourself. You don’t have to venture into the wilds to do it. There are places all around, like Casa Grande National Monument, or Pueblo Grande here in Phoenix, or the Deer Valley Rock Art Center, close to I-17, a few miles from the Loop 101.
Just go there, and imagine.
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