The Pew Site
When the Pew family settled in “string town,” a
series of small houses along what is now Alma School
Road, they stored their hay in a raised area
enclosed by ancient mud walls. In the 1980s, this
special area behind the original Pew adobe home was
still undeveloped. With plans to finally sell this
last five acres surrounded by modern homes, Joe Pew
approached the Southwest Archaeology Team for help.
Would the museum be willing to excavate before the
site was removed to make way for a self-storage
business?
For three years the Southwest Archaeology Team
excavated the archaeological site and recorded the
historic Pew homestead in detail.
Excavations revealed a series of Classic Period
(AD 1100 to 1450) structures, both pithouses and
compounds. The deeply buried pithouses, single room
structures with floors plastered with “caliche” and
dating to around AD 1150, were found several feet
under the surface of the ground. The pithouse
structures found at the Pew Site were very large,
measuring up to 14 feet in length, twice the size of
the average Hohokam pithouse. After the pithouses
were abandoned, two large “compounds” dating to
approximately AD 1300 were built on the ground
surface above them. The occupation at the Pew Site
spanned several hundred years.
A cluster of rooms within a compound at the Pew
Site.
Rooms within a compound at the Pew Site in Mesa.
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