Creosote, desert, depressions, mounds and a scattering of small sherds – without pictures and papers my untrained eye might have passed over this landscape without a second thought – but I know, just a little, about what is here – and even without an academic’s knowledge of the ruins wandering the site and wondering about the past is a privilege.
In the late 1960s a paved road between Redington and San Manuel was planned that would have passed thru, and destroyed most of the Second Canyon Ruin, so in 1969 and 1970 it was excavated as part of the highway salvage archaeology program. Thankfully the road was never built and the Second Canyon Ruin still exists. Hayward Hoskins Franklin published information on the excavation in his 1978 dissertation and today one interesting starting point for reading about this area is Archaeology Southwest’s Summer 2003 (Volume 17, Number 3) Magazine.
The ruin today doesn’t look like the pictures from the excavations – I assume that the excavated areas were filled in once the project ended nearly 50 years ago – plenty of time for the desert to reclaim the site.
