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TIL the 'boring' pile of rocks at a site near Tucson was actually a 900 year old farming system
I went out to a site west of Tucson last Saturday with a local group, and I almost skipped the part where they walked us past this low row of stones. It just looked like a rock line, maybe 30 feet long, nothing you would stop for. Then the guide said those stones were laid out around 1100 to slow rain runoff and keep soil from washing away, and people farmed right there in the desert with it. I had always figured ancient farming meant big flat fields like you see in pictures, and I honestly thought small stone piles were just leftovers from clearing land. What convinced me was kneeling down and seeing the slope of the ground, how the line sat right where water would come down and spread out instead of cutting a gully. There were tiny bits of pottery in the dirt too, which they said came from dumping out old cooking pots over the years. Now I keep looking at old rock walls and low piles near my house and wondering if I have been walking past stuff like this my whole life. Has anyone here seen one of these runoff setups in person, or know how you tell it apart from a plain property line of stones?
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