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Archaeological and Historical Research
at
The San Agustín Mission |
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One
of the first images of Tucson and the San Agustín
Mission |
| U.
S. Border Commissioner John Bartlett came to Tucson, Sonora
in 1852, on a mission to determine the future border between
the United States and Mexico. Bartlett spent much of his time
in recording his impressions of the area, exploring and making
drawings. He climbed Sentinel Peak on the 17th of July, 1852
and made the first detailed sketch of the community (Bartlett
1854:295-296). |
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The Site: The
San Agustín mission was located south of Congress Street and immediately
east of Mission Road. The area was first occupied during the Early Agricultural
period at least 2,600 years ago, with a number of pithouses found on or
to the west of the mission. Hohokam artifacts are abundant in the area,
suggesting a substantial village was present between 1,500 and 500 years
ago. Father Kino documented a Pima village in the area in the 1690s.
History: The
San Agustín Mission was established in the mid-1700s and was completed
in the late-1790s to early-1800s. The Mission included the convento (a
two-story preist's residence and trade school), a chapel, a granary and
other outbuildings, all surrounded by a wall. Nearby were the mission
gardens and a Pima village. The mission was abandoned by the 1840s with
the chapel falling down sometime between 1862 and 1876, but the convento
remained in relatively good condition until the late 1890s. By the 1940s
however, clay mining had encroached upon the mission and in the 1950s
the City of Tucson used the area as a dump.
Archaeology: Excavations on the mission site were conducted by Desert
Archaeology Inc. as part of the Rio Nuevo project in the Fall of1999
and winter of 2000. The excavations were design to determine the
integrity of the mission site and to provide information to urban planners
in the design of the Tucson Origins Heritage
Park. Unfortunatly, excavations found that much of the mission site
had been lost to a variety of processe that damaged the site. Research
utilizing historical inference and 3d computer modeling was then used
to demonstrate that enough historic evidence was avalaible to allow accurate
reconstructions of the mission's convento and granary.
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