Tanya at Casa Grande Ruins. (Tomasito photo)
Our Journey to the East took us by the ruins called "Casa Grande Ruins National Monument" in south-central Arizona.
These badly eroded but still impressive adobe structures mark a town center of the "Hohokam" (All Gone--Used Up People).
This desert culture on the Gila River developed slowly for many centuries and failed and disappeared by 1450 Common Era leaving traces of irrigated fields, scattered trade goods, pot shards and these four-story walls of some grand building.
The old village was vacant and partly in ruins when first visited by European missionaries (Father Kino) in 1694.
This remote site became the first federally protected archeological site in the United States in 1892 and a steel protective roof was built to slow the adobe erosion in the 1930s.
A placard informs the pedestrian viewer that the village was built by unknown people of long ago. "What were their secrets? Adaptability, hard work and human ingenuity: the essentials of life."
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