IMAGINE THAT! A Respect For History: Ancient Hohokam Human Remains Found in Arizona

Just like a recent image shown on this blog from a press release about a "Trees For The Dead" - "Shade-and-Shelter" campaign at the Mesa City Cemetery, this site in Nogales at Kino Springs certainly looks serene.  
Other than that, adjacent to the city cemetery here in Mesa is the Mesa Country Club where some people play golf. Both are on high ground close to ancient Hohokam canals in the Salt River Valley. Kino Springs, in the Santa Cruz River Valley, has an long documented history of early settlements.

Here in Mesa - and in Tempe and Phoenix and Scottsdale - there's documentation as well for what Frank Midvale called "The Pre-Historic Irrigation of the Salt River Valley" of earlier indigenous cultures that were established for centuries before anyone recorded their versions of that history when evidence of those who were here before was "discovered" and their settlements patterns were mapped.

< Here's a closer look from a Digital Geo Map 2003 uploaded by Richard A. Neely.
Major Hohokam Irrigation Systems in the Lower Salt River Valley
The link is below if you're interested in more details.
But let's note at this point, that it was the usual practice to bury the dead on higher ground above the irrigation canals close to settlements and housing patterns.
Finding artifacts or human remains is often the result of chance - or new construction.
Research Gate
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Let's pull back for a second to get a bigger view and a larger perspective for  our Hohokam Heritage  >

If readers of this blog would like to see one historic site here in Mesa that got some respect, there are a couple of posts that were featured
in the last two years.
Please take the time to search for
> "The Short Swift of The Gods on Earth"
> Frank J. Midvale
> Hohokam
> Tarzan and the Venezuelan Bomb
> Mesa Grande Cultural Center
There's still so much more Hohokam Heritage left un-discovered here in Mesa, but at least we do have a baseball training complex named after those who came before - Hohokam Stadium
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Hohokam Human Remains Found in Arizona

Tuesday, September 3, 2019

NOGALES, ARIZONA—Nogales International reports that human remains belonging to a Hohokam individual were discovered by maintenance crews at a golf resort near the Arizona-Mexico border.

Bioarchaeologist James T. Watson of the University of Arizona and the Arizona State Museum determined that the human remains belonged to a member of the Hohokam, a Native American group that lived in the area from about A.D. 640 to 1450. The archaeological site now occupied by the golf course was a vast Hohokam settlement, Watson explained, though it's unclear whether the human remains came from a single burial or a larger cemetery. "It's at a nice bend at the Santa Cruz River, so you can see how it would have been a nice area for a Hohokam village," he said. The remains have been transported to Tucson so that they may be returned to the appropriate descendant community, likely the Tohono O'odham Nation that is now resident in the region

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That's the way it happened in Kino Springs on 29 Sept 2019 -
< The remains were found at the Kino Springs Golf Course, which lies near the Santa Cruz River east of Nogales.
(Google Map from report on Nogales International)
Ancient human remains found at golf course
A maintenance crew working at the Kino Springs Golf Course this week discovered human remains that authorities say date to prehistoric times.
The Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office received a call shortly before 11 a.m. on Tuesday from someone who said they were working on installing water pipes and came across what they believed were human remains.
Sgt. Santiago Gonzales said Sheriff’s Office personnel proceeded to take photos of the remains, and the images were then sent to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner for review.
“They were able to determine that the remains were prehistoric, so at this point the case is going to be referred to the Arizona Historical Museum,” Gonzales said.
The golf course is set along the north-flowing Santa Cruz River, and according to the article “Archaeological discoveries reveal value of Santa Cruz River in prehistory,” posted to the website of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center, the Santa Cruz River Valley is one of North America’s longest inhabited regions, with the earliest evidence of human occupation dating back 12,000 years.
“Around 4,000 prehistoric sites have been identified in the Santa Cruz watershed and exciting new discoveries continue to be made,” the article saysSource: Nogales International

Human remains found at golf course connected to Hohokam village

Nogales International Aug 30, 2019 Updated

An expert in prehistoric anthropology says that human remains found last week by a work crew at the Kino Springs Golf Course belonged to a Native American who was buried at the site of a longstanding Hohokam settlement.

James T. Watson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and associate curator of BioArcheology at the Arizona State Museum, came to Nogales last Friday to examine the skeletal remains, which were discovered the previous Tuesday by workers installing water pipes at the golf course, and subsequently transported by local authorities to a Nogales mortuary.

Having determined that the bones corresponded to the Hohokam community that occupied the present-day site of the golf course from roughly 640 A.D. to 1450, Watson said, he brought the remains back to Tucson to arrange for returning them to the appropriate claimant community – in this case, probably the Tohono O’odham Nation, which was preceded in the region by the Hohokam.

“Normally this is what we do with inadvertent discoveries like this, when we know they’re Native American,” Watson said. “We contact the tribes and ask what they’d like to do with them, how they’d like them to be treated.”

Sometimes, he said, the preference is to have the remains removed and returned to the tribe. In other cases, the communities want the burial site covered up and protected from further disturbance, though as Watson noted: “In this case, we didn’t have that choice because the remains were already removed.”

After Sheriff’s Office personnel determined that the bones found at the golf course were not of forensic concern, they contacted Watson. In addition to collecting the remains, his job was to put the discovery in the appropriate archaeological context.

"The area “is really an ideal location,” Watson said. “It’s at a nice bend at the Santa Cruz River, so you can really picture how it would have been a nice area for a Hohokam village, growing their crops and whatnot.”

Because the archaeological site is large and the irrigation trench dug by the work crew is narrow, it’s difficult to determine if the bones the workers found were an individual grave, or part of a larger cemetery.

He also wasn’t able to estimate when during the roughly 800-year history of the Hohokam village the person was buried.