The Dairy Site, in the town of Marana, has been intermittently occupied from the beginning of the Early Agricultural period (ca. 1200 B.C.) to the end of the Hohokam era (ca. A.D. 1450). Beginning in December 2017, 10 areas, totaling approximately 13,456 square meters, were mechanically stripped by Tierra’s contractor, Casey’s Backhoe, to expose the outlines and orientations of any buried structures or extramural features that might be present below the surface. Stripping and subsequent excavations by the Tierra team revealed 269 features or possible features, including 111 pit structures, 40 rock-filled roasting pits, 9 thermal pits, 28 nonthermal pits, 11 midden areas, 6 borrow pits, 4 extramural surfaces, 2 ash lenses, and 7 human burial features.
Control units (measuring at least 1 by 2 m) were hand-excavated by Tierra archaeologists into all structures and possible structures to identify stratigraphic layering and structure orientation, expose fire hearths for possible archaeomagnetic dating, and collect a representative sample of the artifacts and biotic materials from within the houses. The remaining portions of 31 structures were then completely excavated. Tierra’s 2017–2018 data recovery report contributed valuable data about prehistoric life at the Dairy Site and summarized over 25 years of research at one of the longest-lived prehistoric settlements in the Tucson Basin.
Since then, archaeological monitoring for human burials has been conducted during construction of the DeAnza Residential Development. For six months, an archaeologist from Tierra and a Tribal monitor from the Tohono O’odham Nation were on site during all ground-disturbing activities. Six burials were recovered during this time. This project followed several data recovery and monitoring projects previously completed by Tierra at the Dairy Site beginning in 2003.
