Columnist Susan Snyder: Lost City can be a real find

Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2001 | 10:08 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

When was the last time you visited the Lost City Museum?

Chances are, it was one of those grade-school field trips involving a long ride in a yellow bus with brown-bag lunches and sticky fingers. Or maybe you've never been to the Overton museum at all.

"We hardly get any visitors from Las Vegas," said the woman who collects $2 a head from every adult who walks into the place.

A quick perusal of the guest book shows visitors from Japan, Canada, California, Montana, Florida -- anywhere but here.

"That's the way it always is, isn't it?" a visitor from England said during a recent visit. "You don't see what's close to you."

We almost didn't see some of this stuff. About a fifth of the area called the Lost City was flooded by Lake Mead when the Hoover Dam was opened.

Museum workers and displays say the Lost City is a series of ruins from the Basketmaker and Puebloan periods that extend about 30 miles along the Muddy River.

For those whose ancient Southwest history isn't up to "Jeopardy!" standards, the museum has charts and graphs make it pretty simple to learn.

Basketmakers lived pre-100 B.C. to about 700 A.D. They were into living in caves or rock shelters, tossing darts with a flat tool called an atlatl and later built some pit houses, used bows and arrows, grew a few crops and lived in small villages. Think of it as one of those teeny towns where you don't want to run out of gas.

Puebloans lived from about 700 A.D. to around 1300 A.D. They built single- and multilevel masonry dwellings, made more sophisticated pots, added irrigation to their farming efforts and lived in bigger villages.

Think condos and Summerlin.

The Lost City's inhabitants were part of a string of such settlements that included others in Hovenweep, Utah, Kayenta, Ariz., Mesa Verde in Colorado and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, the exhibits show.

Southern Nevada's ancient ruins were "discovered" by brothers Fay and John Perkins, who reported their find to the governor in 1924. The state enlisted the Smithsonian and Carnegie institutions. They sent archaeologist M.R. Harrington to oversee the dig from 1924 to 1936.

Civilian Conservation Corps workers earned $1 a day plus board and tent space while excavating the sites that were to be flooded by Lake Mead. They also built the original Lost City Museum that opened in 1935. Portions of the original building are included in the current one.

The workers unearthed 121 sites and excavated more than 610 rooms. The Lost City's treasures -- those in the museum and those still awaiting discovery --provide learning opportunities for college archaeology students.

You can learn what different petroglyph symbols mean and see twine woven from yucca fibers, juniper bark, willow fibers and bean pods. (The only things we've managed to make that last as long are Styrofoam and nuclear waste.)

So if you've never been to the Lost City Museum or haven't been in a long while, take the time.

You can't beat $2 for an afternoon's entertainment. And it's a pleasant 70-mile drive this time of year -- especially without the school bus.