Earthen Platform Mounds

Robert Ciaccio artwork, part of the wayside image

Commissioned art with restricted use

Look at the mounds of dirt 100 yards ahead. They are man-made. Picture them 900 years ago, covered with buildings and plazas and people, all inside a rectangular 7-foot-tall wall.

Imagine the work it would take to make such a 10-foot-tall base platform by hand, then build a complex like you see in this illustration atop it. Archeologists have found about 50 platform mounds like these here in southern Arizona.

The mounds you see are about five feet taller today than they would have been centuries ago. National Park Service archeologists have covered these platforms with backfill to preserve and protect them.

Backfilling involves reburying ruins with soil. This preservation method cannot stop deterioration, but it can slow down erosion and stabilize the site.

Agricultural Connection?

Archeologists find most platform mounds at the beginning or end of large canal systems.

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A PDF of the wayside (6,673 KB) is available.

 

• Is there more?

  
  

  David Winchester, park volunteer and retired park ranger, details some of the early archeological history of the park.

  Credit / Author:

  NPS, movie outtakes, thanks to volunteer editor Jenise Cook

  Date created:

  10/14/2020

  Audio Transcript

  [David Winchester] We found 6 wall enclosures that were identified by Dr. Jesse Fewkes as compounds. From 1906 to 1908 he was out here, the Smithsonian sent out an expedition here to excavate or investigate the site.

  During those years they found 6 wall enclosures that they identified as compounds here on the monument. They vary in size. They contain in some cases many structures or in one case only 1 large structure. Compound B is the one that contains the 2 large platform mounds. We don’t know exactly what the platform mounds symbolize or what they were used for but there were structures apparently built on top of those. And then there are rooms located at the base, around the base of these 2 large platform mounds. And then the surrounding outer wall of course.