Casa Grande Ruins National Monument Hosts Featured Speaker Allen Denoyer

January 19, 2018

Dave Carney

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument

COOLIDGE, AZ – Casa Grande Ruins’ annual speaker series continues January 31 through February 28, 2018. At noon on January 31, 2018 Casa Grande Ruins will host Allen Denoyer, who will present a lecture titled “Puddled Adobe House Construction”. The speaker series will continue every Wednesday at noon through February 28.

Allen Denoyer has been working as a professional Archaeologist since the early 1990’s. He has field experience throughout the Southwest and in the Rocky Mountain Region. In the Tucson Basin, Allen has worked on many of the sites that defined the Early Agricultural period in Southern Arizona.  

Allen has also worked in the Rocky Mountain regions of Colorado, Utah, and especially Wyoming. Allen is a skilled replicator of ancient artifacts. He has been teaching Flintknapping, stone jewelry, and wood carving classes for Archaeology Southwest’s Hands On Program, the last couple of years. His replicas are used in classrooms, universities, and for experimental archaeology projects.

In this Power Point presentation, Allen will talk about recent experimental work Archaeology Southwest Field School students participated in under his direction. The project entailed hand-construction of two Salado-style puddled adobe rooms. This is the same basic construction technique people used in building structures at Casa Grande Ruins.

This experimental project incorporated observations from excavations in the upper Gila River region of New Mexico. The construction work gave students a much better understanding of what they were excavating, and the excavation and construction together helped them understand ancient techniques and processes.

The program begins at 12:00 pm in the Casa Grande Ruins visitor center theater at 1100 W Ruins Drive, Coolidge AZ, 85128. There is no fee for the program, but normal entrance fees apply. 

Casa Grande Ruins National Monument protects the multi-story Great House (Casa Grande) and the remnants of other ancient structures built by the Ancestral Sonoran Desert People over 800 years ago.  Established as the nation’s first federal archaeological reserve in 1892, the Ruins sparked the beginning of the archaeological preservation movement in America.  The Monument is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., May through September, and from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., October through April, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Independence Day holidays.  Directions and additional information are available on the Monument’s website, http://www.nps.gov/cagr. You may call (520) 723-3172, or follow us on Facebook by searching for Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.