Arizona fires sweep land rich with ancient sites, artifacts

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — As Jason Nez scans rugged mountains, high desert and cliffsides for signs of ancient tools and dwellings unique to the U.S. Southwest, he keeps in mind that they’re part of a bigger picture.

And, fire is not new to them. “They have been burned many, many times, and that’s healthy,” said Nez, a Navajo archaeologist and firefighter. “A lot of our cultural resources we see as living, and living things are resilient.”

As a pair of wildfires skirt this mountainous northern Arizona city, the flames are crossing land dense with reminders of human existence through centuries — multilevel stone homes, rock carvings and pieces of clay and ceramic pots that have been well-preserved in the arid climate since long before fire suppression became a tactic.

Today, firefighting crews increasingly are working to avoid or minimize damage from bulldozers and other modern-day tools on archaeological sites and artifacts, and protect those on public display to ensure history isn’t lost on future generations.

“Some of those arrowheads, some of those pottery sherds (broken ceramics) you see out there have that power to change the way we look at how humans were here,” Nez said.

The crews’ efforts include recruiting people to advise them on wildlife and habitat, air quality and archaeology.

In Arizona, a handful of archaeologists have walked miles in recent months locating evidence of meaningful past human activity in and around scorched areas and mapping it for protection.

Just last week, a crew spotted a more than 1,000-yearold semi-buried dwelling known as a pit house.

“We know this area is really important to tribes, and it’s ancestral land for them,” said U.S. Forest Service archaeologist and tribal relations specialist Jeanne Stevens. “When we do more survey work, it helps add more pieces to the puzzle in terms of what’s on the landscape.”

It’s not just the scattered ruins that need protecting.

The nearby Wupatki National Monument — a center of trade for Indigenous communities around the 1100s — was evacuated because of wildfire twice this year. Exhibits there hold priceless objects, including 800-year-old corn, beans and squash, along with intact stone Clovis points used for hunting that date back some 13,000 years.

Before the first wildfire hit in April, forcing the evacuation of the monument and hundreds of homes outside Flagstaff, there was no set plan on how quickly to get the artifacts out because wildfire wasn’t seen as an imminent threat to Wupatki.

“Now with climate change, conditions have become different, hence a new plan,” monument curator Gwenn Gallenstein said.