DIGGING INTO HISTORY: Uncovering Oldways Farming

Sometimes is what's you see all around you - the small wonders of Patagonia that might go un-noticed or "hidden" or neglected in the big landscape of The Mountain Empire - and sometimes it's what groups of people are digging into once again: to expose and reveal early cultures living on the land along the water-giving lifeways of The Santa Cruz River and its tributary streams that once flowed on the conflux surfaces here: places like Harshaw Creek along the gateway trails of what are now vacant "Ghost Towns" and places like The Sonoita Valley and Sonoita Creek that winds its way through history starting about eight miles northeast of Patagonia, weaving and carving its way in the ground through streets and through neighborhoods in town, past where the Wastewater Treatment Plant is located now (where people swam on Blue Heaven before it became polluted), on through what is now a riparian habitat restoration area under the land stewardship preserve of The Nature Conservancy, on through what is now The Circle Z Ranch, on to the man-made Lake Patagonia, and on for some twenty-plus miles from there into the 9,000-acre Sonoita Creek Preserve Natural Area.
The video embedded here shows an archeological dig along the banks of the northern reach of The Santa Cruz River in Tucson in the Rio Nuevo area uncovering and exposing evidence in the timeline of history of indigenous or "native" people cultivating foodcrops and living on the land centuries before the Christian and western world's concept of time began on the Georgian Calendar: 1,250 B.C. (before Christ) . . . it's now three thousand years later.
From the many stories told to me, the same evidence of much earlier cultures following the life-giving waterways of the Santa Cruz River in the headwaters rising in The San Rafael Valley and its tributaries like the Sonoita Creek, should be found here to honor and celebrate those that came before - before the lands became "divided" by the Spanish Conquest back in the 15th and 16th Centuries.
We've come a long way down the centuries- all of us who migrated here - but let us "not forget" those forebears who were on this continent before . . . the brave people who dedicated their lives to living on these lands . . . We just need to dig deeper.
Factoid: Santa Cruz County is the only county in Arizona that does not have an "officially recognized" site dedicated to native people.
To-go-to Information:
www.desert.com
www.azpm.org
www.cdarc.org