Images of Casa Grande Ruins National Monument – Central Arizona, taken in March 2018.

In the seemingly uninhabitable Sonoran desert stands the ruins of Casa Grande (the Great House) in Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. Built by the Ancestral People and completed around 1350, this four-story building made with 3,000 tons of caliche mud using juniper, pine and fir tree materials carried from over 60 miles away is an exceptional example of the skill of the hunter-gatherers of the period. Additionally water from the Salt and Gila rivers flowed through an intricate canal system that allowed the desert to be irrigated to maintain crops to feed the inhabitance of this and other compounds in the area. The region remained viable through the 1400s after which the population dispersed throughout the region for unknown reasons.

To protect this important historical site the area was declared an archeological reserve in 1892; the first designation of its kind in the US. Early on a canopy was added to protect the Great House and the current steel-and-concrete canopy was built in 1932 to better protect the structure.