Ancient dwelling discovered

Afsha Bawany

Friday, Aug. 1, 2003 | 9:51 a.m.

The valley's cities are relatively young. Las Vegas turns 100 in 2005, and Henderson recently celebrated its 50th anniversary.

But archaeologists now have important proof that people lived in the Las Vegas Valley at least 1,400 years ago.

The valley's first "pit house" has been discovered near Lake Las Vegas. It is believed to have been home to a Virgin Anasazi family, and has been radiocarbon-dated to A.D. 400 to 650.

The Virgin Anasazi are ancestors of the Pueblo tribes. The name refers to the fact that they lived near the Virgin River in Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

They disappeared from the archaeological record around 1300, but the Las Vegas pit house dates back to the earliest known era of the Virgin Anasazi. That's one of the reasons the find is so significant.

"We have very few sites recorded for this time period" in the United States, Laurie Perry, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Reclamation, said.

"It's really exciting to us," one of Perry's colleagues, Patricia Hicks, said.

With the constant development in the valley, finding a historical site such as this house is rare, archaeologists working on the site said.

With a dedication that would make Indiana Jones proud, excavators have worked on the site -- a hole about 24 feet wide and 30 feet long -- for three weeks. They've been sifting through the soil for up to seven hours a day, looking for Native American artifacts.

"A sneaking suspicion" led to this major recovery of a piece of Vegas history, Hicks said.

Previous discoveries of primitive tools and pottery shards near the construction of the East Valley Lateral and Rainbow Garden Weir near the Las Vegas Wash prompted archaeologists to dig deeper, and that's when they found the home.

Richard Ahlstrom, another one of the archaeologists working on the dig, said most evidence shows most Native Americans had mobile settlements, but this pit house shows the family who lived here were permanent residents.

This house gives archaeologists a different perspective on the area's ancient residents, Ahlstrom said.

An extended family probably resided in the pit house, Hicks said. The home was built as a dome or cone covered with roof of brush and earth. Fragments of poles used to support the structure have been found as well as two fragments of a metate, a stone used to grind plant foods. Fragments of shell beads, which were used for ornamentation, as well as arrowheads -- still sharp -- have been also been uncovered.

The home site, near the Las Vegas Wash, was probably chosen for the easy access to water and the abundance of agriculture that surrounded the area. The residents that lived there dug a foot below the ground to help prepare a good floor to live on, Perry said.

"People were actually here using the resources in the valley relatively early," Hicks said. "There's a bit more archaeology in this city than people realize."

Before crews end their excavation next week, they will take samplings from the floor of the home to look for more types of plants, tools or animal bones.

Dirt will be put back into the hole and covered with a special cloth to protect it from erosion. The artifacts found will be placed in the Clark County Museum. The site is protected because it belongs in the Clark County Wetlands Park.

But that doesn't mean the search for evidence of these people will end. The archaeologists conduct additional excavations in the same area, and they expect to find more pit houses.

"This is probably not the only one that is here," Hicks said. "You don't find these in isolation."