Modern Rivers, Ancient Times: Public Outreach Program for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Type of Services: Public outreach
Client and Contact Information: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation)
Phoenix Area Office
P.O. Box 81169
Phoenix, AZ 85069-1169
Approximate cost: $400,000
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| View of city of Tucson, Arizona, from Gates Pass in the Tucson Mountains. Photograph by Jefferson Reid. |
The Central Arizona Project (CAP) was a monumental undertaking, a 330-mile-long concrete river that brings water uphill from Lake Havasu to the metropolitan regions of central Arizona. The archaeology necessitated by this project was equally vast in scope. It began in 1968 and continued for decades, costing millions of dollars and yielding vast amounts of information about Arizona's ancient, ethnographically described, and historical-era peoples. Most of this information was distributed in the form of typical cultural resource management reports, which were highly descriptive and technical. Reclamation sought something different, a series of public-outreach products that would serve as the capstone to the CAP and disseminate the research results in a format accessible to a public audience.
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| Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct. Photograph courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Joe Madrigal, Jr., photographer. |
SRI responded to this need with an unsolicited proposal to create educational materials for distribution to public audiences. Reclamation contracted with SRI to produce:
- An educational kit for classroom use containing curriculum material, lessons, games, a teacher's guide (People, Place, and Time), artifact replicas, and resource materials
- A videotape (Archaeology: A Journey into the Past) about archaeology designed for classroom use (included in kit)
- A book synthesizing Central Arizona Project archaeology (included in kit)
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| The cover of the teacher's guide for the People, Place, and Time educational kit. |
The educational kit will be distributed to each of Arizona's 300 school districts, and a series of teacher workshops will guide teachers through materials in the kit and demonstrate how to use them.
The book, Rivers of Rock: Stories from a Stone-Dry Land: Central Arizona Project Archaeology, is an innovative overview of the importance of water to desert peoples written for a general audience. It looks at the Colorado River-the source of CAP water-and the regions through which the river flows. It also summarizes the history of water control in the West and the CAP. Most important, it summarizes what we learned about the relationships between people and water through CAP archaeology. The large-format book is highly readable, containing useful and interesting information, poetry, and brief excerpts of some the finest writing about the desert Southwest presented in sidebars. Rivers of Rock is illustrated amply with black-and-white and color photographs and line drawings.
". . . this is a wonderful collection of stories. It pulls together, in a very accessible manner, a large amount of information published in obscure or difficult-to-locate reports. . . . The Bureau of Reclamation should be commended for sponsoring this book and for sharing with a broad audience the results of the Central Arizona Project's archaeological studies." Todd Bostwick, Pueblo Grande Museum.