![]() The City Council, which then included the fiercely libertarian Keno Hawker, a future Mesa mayor, voted unanimously to condemn the property, paving the way for a city takeover. Evidently, no legalities would have prevented that. An offer was on the table, she said, for someone to buy the site and level the mound for a nursing home. That aside, the city and Acquanetta haggled over dollar signs. "There is a presence among these ruins that can be felt when standing by them," Diane Howell wrote. An Arizona Republic columnist questioned whether such a place could even be "owned" at all, given its legacy. The problem was price.Ī city official at the time said the land was either worthless, or priceless. And by the mid-1980s Mesa was finally ready to fulfill the wishes of citizens who as early as 1927 had paraded down Main Street to support creating a Mesa Grande park.Īcquanetta said she was all for that, too. The Rosses bought the land from Midvale in 1962,Īcquanetta - one of the earliest celebrities to go by one name only - received title to the site after the couple divorced. Tagged by Hollywood as "The Venezuelan Volcano," Burnu Acquanetta actually was born in Wyoming and often spoke of her own Native American ancestry. That meshed with the wishes of Ross' wife, Acquanetta, who in former decades had been a B-movie actress. "He didn't want it to get taken by the hospital and made into a parking lot," Lance Ross said, regarding his father. At the time, the owner was Frank Midvale, an aging archaeologist who had held title since 1927. Long a playground for Mesa kids, the unfenced mound had no protection other than what was conferred by whoever happened to own it. He became a driving force behind building the former Mesa Lutheran Hospital just across from the Indian ruins. His father, Jack Ross, a Phoenix area car dealer, business leader and philanthropist, decided in the early 1960s that Mesa needed a new hospital. Lance Ross, a Scottsdale resident and real estate broker, remembers that battle well. It has been a long struggle for Mesa to acquire and curate the property, no more so than in the mid-1980s as the city dickered with a former Hollywood starlet for the right to preserve Mesa Grande for posterity. Officials there would have overseen, for example, the excavation of the famous canals that fed the Hohokams' agricultural economy until it collapsed. Mesa Grande is believed to have been the religious and administrative center of a large Hohokam village, governing much of life on the south side of the Salt River. And then, by 1450 or so, it was gone.Īgainst that backdrop, the near-century that has passed after Mesa residents first publicly rallied to create the archaeological park may not seem like such a long while, after all. ![]() The Hohokam civilization itself may have lasted for a millennium and a half. Mesa Grande itself was occupied for 350 years - more than a century longer than the present history of the United States. ![]() to not be able to survive in this environment." "If you live in the desert, you don't have to imagine many things that would cause people. "The Hohokam were a lost people - a people who disappeared," Mesa Mayor Scott Smith said at a media preview of the Mesa Grande Cultural Park. The park showcases a 25-foot-tall mound that has been partly excavated over the years but most of whose contents still lie beneath the dust that accumulated after its wooden roofs collapsed ages ago. On Saturday, a nearly century-long effort will culminate with the opening of a park around this archaeological treasure. Maybe that is more the point of the Mesa Grande ruins than anything - the lesson being the future, not the past. ![]() It stirred the dust that covered the mound and stung the small group of people clustered there as if to say that what nature once did to those who lived here, it can do again to you. It carried the haunting sounds of Native American flute music. PHOENIX - There was something forlorn about the frigid breeze that swirled this week around an ancient mound in Mesa.
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