RUINS REVEALED

In an update to an earlier post, Waldo Wilcox unveiled the ancient Indian ruins he guarded for decades:

What mostly distinguishes Range Creek is that through quirk of fate and human will, it escaped both the ravages of looters and, until recently, the spades of archaeologists. Cliffside grain-storage vaults have been found here with their lids still intact, the corn and rye still inside. And while many sites in the West can still produce an old stone arrowhead or two, researchers found whole arrows here just a few weeks ago, apparently lying in the dust just where they were dropped 10 centuries ago at the time of William the Conqueror....

Dr. Jones said that, so far, 225 sites at Range Creek had been documented, some as small as a single wall of pictographs, others as large as a village cluster of a half-dozen dugout pit houses. Twenty of the sites were catalogued in the 1930's — at the time of the only other in-depth scientific work here that anyone knows about — by a team from Harvard University.

"The other 200 sites have never been seen by anybody," Dr. [Kevin] Jones said, adding that there are unquestionably thousands of sites, and that every time a team goes out, still more are found.

I keep being as amazed at Mr. Wilcox's stewardship of the site as I do the site itself. Both are impressive.