Vandals topple 'Stonehenge'stone
The Arizona Republic Oct. 29, 1997 Phoenix officials were planning to preserve what might be the Valley's version of Stonehenge. But vandals got to it first, toppling a 5-foot-high, half-ton stone in the middle of what appears to be a solar calendar built by the Hohokam 700 years ago. A city archaeologist created a sign months ago to tell visitors of the site's significance, in the hopes that vandals would stay clear of it. But city officials were waiting for temperatures to drop before installing the sign. "It was our mistake," said Mary Kay Schroeder, administrator for the Northeast District of the Phoenix Parks, Recreation and Library Department. "We thought we would be able to wait until the cooler weather." The site is difficult to get to. It is a half-mile uphill from a trail head on the north side of the North Mountain Preserve, near Thunderbird Road and Central Avenue. Parks officials say they are not convinced a sign would have prevented the damage. "Unfortunately, the kind of people who would do something like this aren't likely to be deterred by a sign," said Marie Chapple Camacho, a spokeswoman for the parks department. The pushed-over stone was discovered Sunday by Phoenix resident Stan Plum. The 41-year-old telephone repairman has been studying the site for four years. "I was devastated that vandals had toppled a key part of a centuries-old engineering marvel," he said. Archaeologists have known about the site for decades. But, until recently, it was believed to be a Hohokam fort. Plum and Todd Bostwick, the city of Phoenix's archaeologist, recently began promoting a theory that the site is a highly complex Hohokam observatory that tracks solar cycles, much like England's Stonehenge. Their research was published a month ago in The Practical Observer, an astronomy magazine. They recently presented their findings to a conference of archaeologists in Santa Fe. "As devastating as this act of vandalism is, it does give us an extremely rare chance to gain insight on how the Hohokam built this site," Plum said. "That's something that we know very little about." The parks department now is working to secure the site and protect it from future vandalism. Officials have installed a sign and are considering plans for a fence. Once that work is completed, officials will decide what to do with the toppled stone. "It is my hope that we move it back to its original site and alignment, as best as we can, using only the tools that the Hohokam might have used - yucca ropes and levers," Plum said. The site is surrounded by a rock wall with a 90-foot diameter. Within the walls, there are several rock alignments and petroglyphs that appear to track the movements of the sun and possibly other celestial bodies. During hundreds of visits to the site, Plum and Bostwick learned that during the summer solstice, the sun would cast a beam of light through a crack of the center stone, before it was toppled, and illuminate a dot in the middle of a circular petroglyph. As the sun set, the beam of light would grow until the entire petroglyph was illuminated. During the winter solstice, an alignment of rocks would cast a shadow on a petroglyph on the center stone. "I believe that if a sign had been posted, the vandalism would not have happened," Plum said. "I don't think the vandals realized the significance of the center stone. To them, it was just another rock to push over." Ryan Konig can be reached at 444-7123 or at ryan.konig@pni.com via e-mail. |
