User:Auriel Kitsu
Artist/Artisan/Scientist 50 year old, mixed ancestry, female
Residence: Sonoran Desert
Interests: outsider art, skin illustrations, tech couture and accoutrement, jeweled adornments; guitars both acoustic and electric; reading/writing; cooking; biking, hiking, camping; environmental psychology; volunteer archaeology
Passport In Time is a volunteer archaeology and historic preservation program of the US Forest Service that I signed up with.
My most recent project took place on land known as the Thumb, a long overlooked area of the Tonto National Forest. What little is known of the area suggests a prehistoric cultural frontier with ties to the Hohokam, Anchan, Mogollon, Anasazi, and later Salado cultures. Historically, the area was home to the Apache Peaks band of the San Carlos Western Apache as well as later Euro-American mining and ranching. We worked on documentation of the historic silver mining town of McMillenville, occupied from 1876 into the 1880s, focusing on locating evidence of an attack on the town in July 1882 by renegade Apaches from the nearby San Carlos Reservation. We made extensive use of metal detectors during fieldwork. My team put in a solid 40 hours assisting professional Archaeologists in locating and recording structures and features of the town, preparing maps, and documenting artifacts.
Looking forward to investing more of my time in site work in the coming 2008 year.