Contents
|
Front Range: History Sleepy farm town turned sprawling city takes care not to trample on its past By Lisa Levitt Ryckman AURORA -- It's there, but most people never see it. It's there, in bits of flint, pieces of charred wood, old bottles, the crumbling foundation of something that once was.
It's there if they can find it, these amateur archaeologists who cover endless parallel transects of parched prairie with eyes to the ground. They are looking for the past. In Aurora. "One man's rock," said archaeologist Gordon Tucker, "is another man's history." The job of reclaiming the story of what was has come down to this: fanning out across acres of open space to find any evidence of history worth preserving. Staying one step ahead of the bulldozers by keeping one foot in the past. "Our cultural landscapes," explained Susan Collins, Colorado state archaeologist. "Places where the land itself has a view of what life was in the past." The art of preserving landscape has changed with people's perception of what's worth saving. The archaeology of excavating and restoring Indian artifacts on the Western Slope has given way to a new urban archaeology on the Front Range. "It's because of the population density and the pressure for development," Collins said. "There's a newfound awareness for local planning for open space that's happening. And that's very new." Nan Rickey had the idea first. The Aurora historic preservationist had just finished surveying the city's historic buildings. She decided to tackle the ground beneath her feet. "The intention of the city was to get a handle on what archeological resources they had before they went away," said archaeologist Tucker, who supervised the Aurora project's initial phase. The first task: to find out what they already knew. To locate the archaeological sites in Aurora already catalogued somewhere and, in many cases, long forgotten. That meant scouring libraries in Colorado and the University of Nebraska Museum in Lincoln, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "The perception -- the wrong perception -- that we wanted to change was that sure, there were historic buildings and historic doodads of one kind or another in Aurora," Tucker said. "But other than that, barren landscape -- right? Not so." In the past 70 years, 43 archaeological projects had been undertaken within the city of Aurora, and 182 "cultural resources" had been discovered and recorded, most of them in the '80s and '90s. Federal law requires surveys of land used for federal projects, which means there were archaeologists all over the land affected by E-470. The 11th hole of the Saddle Rock Golf Course is built on a 2,000-year-old Indian campsite where scientists found prehistoric pieces of charcoal, flakes of stone and buffalo bone. Some of the artifacts are on display in the clubhouse. There have been people in Aurora for 12 millennia, but the first house was built just a century ago. In 1891, Denver real estate tycoon Donald Fletcher founded a town on the western edge of Colorado's eastern plains and named it after himself. He ran out two years later, sticking the residents with bond payments for non-existent water. But the settlers stayed and changed the name from Fletcher to Aurora. Today, the sleepy little farm town has exploded to 250,000 people on 90,000 acres -- more than 53,000 of which remain undeveloped. But not for long. And that is part of the reason some developers have become champions of the Aurora archaeological survey. They want to know what's there before an unexpected find slows down their project. "Look, we preserve lots of things in our business," said Michael Sheldon, an attorney for developers who has urged his Aurora clients to contribute to the survey. "We preserve wetlands. We preserve certain plateaus and outcroppings. To me, this doesn't seem much different. It's just a significant feature that runs with the land." Finding an artifact doesn't mean it will be saved for posterity. Anything found belongs to the private land owners. They are not required to do anything unless they find human remains. Then they must determine whether it's a burial area. Colorado and the West are fertile ground for archaeologists, but Tucker estimates that less than 5 percent of the state's 104,247 square miles of land have been scrutinized by trained eyes. "The sites found in Aurora are exciting in a different way. They leave a lot to the imagination, they don't hit you in the face and knock you down," Tucker said. "It's exciting to have what was once a puzzle, and there are only six pieces. And you're trying to make a picture." It is tough work on an unforgiving landscape. It doesn't give up its secrets easily. There are acres with no trace of humankind at all. And then there's something: stone chips, pieces of petrified wood used in tool-making by prehistoric people, fragments of purple glass manufactured only before 1917. "People asked, 'How do I distinguish one piece of rock from another?"' Tucker said. "But once somebody instructs you, once you've got your mind and eyes trained, you see it. The best way to learn is to do." So they did: Boy Scouts, senior citizens, amateur archaeologists, everybody carrying a bunch of little red flags to mark promising finds. When they looked back, there were dozens of flags fluttering in the breeze. The survey located 91 new sites, 65 of them prehistoric, or at least 500 years old. "This particular spot on the globe has a cultural history that is at least 10,000 years old," Tucker said. "There were human beings on the spot that became the city of Aurora, and they were here for a very, very long time." Volunteers will be out again this summer, walking more of the 45,000 acres left to inspect. Looking for a piece of the past. "We're not shaking the world," Rickey said. "We're just trying to save it before it goes away."
March 26, 1999 Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society |
