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Work began last weekend on a new Colossal Cave Mountain Park attraction that will give visitors a glimpse of how ancient inhabitants of the area lived.

The archeology trail that the park staff and volunteers began to build Saturday will provide visitors with a sort of walking tour through history, said J.J. Lamb, the park's education director and project manager.

When completed — next year, Lamb hopes — it will help people to understand how the Hohokam, Sobaipuri and, later, the Apache peoples who've lived in this area over the past millennium.

"We're going to be very respectful of the Indian cultures, and we want to impart that respect in the construction of the trail," Lamb said.

The 0.8-mile trail, to be located near the southern end of the park, will be called "Path of the Ancestors" — or "Kekelbada Ha-Wo:gga," in the language of the Tohono O'odham, who are descended from the Hohokam.

Regina Siquieros, an Indian-language expert and member of the O'odham nation, said she came up with that name as a way of acknowledging the importance of the O'odham and their ancestors to the history of this area.

"I hold our elders in the highest respect," Siquieros said. "We've learned a lot from them, and they've brought us to this point. So I thought it would be great to acknowledge them and their history in their setting, in our setting."

Trail may help preservation

The trail will incorporate portions of the existing Gale Bundrick Hiking Trail, and will include a quarter-mile loop that will take visitors to seven bedrock mortars — holes formed in rock after years of use to grind mesquite beans and corn into flour or meal, Lamb said.

Those are real, but other features along the trail will be simulated, or "interpretive." Those include a mock-up pithouse — dwellings built over a pit dug into the earth — and two pithouse "footprints" — simulated remnants of a pithouse like those that archaeologists might encounter long after its inhabitants had left.

There are at least 17 archaeologically significant sites around the park east of Tucson, but those will not be included on the archaeology trail, Lamb said. The park staff may allow supervised visits to those sites, but they won't be made available to the general public because souvenir hunters may take relics and otherwise disturb the site, making it much more difficult to study, she said.

Preserving the archaeological resources within the park is one of the reasons Lamb and others want to build the trail.

"We want to make people aware of archaeological sites and make them aware of the importance of preserving those sites," she said.

Many Hohokam and Sobaipuri relics that were in Colossal Cave and elsewhere around the park disappeared in the years after the park was established in the 1930s, largely because of souvenir hunters, Lamb said.

Corridor among endangered

"Those were different times," she said. "At that point in time, they were considered really interesting, curiosities, and probably a lot of people thought they were preserving them by taking them home and putting them on their shelf.

"But it's like a puzzle, and it's hard to fit it all together and see the whole picture with some pieces missing."

In 2004, the Cienega Corridor was named one of the nation's eight most endangered cultural landscapes by The Cultural Landscape Foundation. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit seeks to boost awareness of the importance of cultural landscapes, areas with cultural and natural resources that are historically significant.

Docents will lead tours on the trail, and interpretive signs will be installed at intervals to inform visitors about the life of the Indian inhabitants of this area, Lamb said. Signs will be posted near plants used for medicinal purposes. Exhibits will provide information about primitive technologies, such as chipping a stone to create a sharp cutting edge, extracting fibers from agave leaves and fire-starting techniques.

Much of the trail will follow La Posta Quemada Wash, where water once flowed more frequently throughout the year before ranching and drought reduced the marshy area into a green riparian strip along the banks of the wash.

Lamb, who conceived the trail project, said it will complement the research and interpretive work that park staffers have been doing for years.

Grant funds planning efforts

She and others have been working on plans for the park since last fall, not long after the Arizona Humanities Council awarded the park a $10,000 grant. It was one of two projects statewide to receive the grants, which are paid for through the National Endowment for the Humanities' We the People program. The program is intended to promote exploration of American history and culture.

Volunteers and experts working on the project include Siquieros and her husband, Bernie, a project manager with the Tohono O'odham Nation cultural affairs office.

Others come from the cultural resources committee of the Cienega Corridor Conservation Council, a volunteer group that seeks to protect the natural and archeological resources from the Rincon Valley to the Sonoita Valley.

Other experts are with the Sonoran Institute, Old Pueblo Archaeology Center and Native Seeds Search.

Royce Davenport, a Vail-area artist, will create a map of the trail and its features.

Regina Siquieros, program coordinator with the University of Arizona's American Indian Language Development Institute, said she hopes the archaeology trail will not only commemorate the past, but also help keep the Tohono O'odham language and culture alive.

"A lot of native languages and cultural practices are slowly fading," she said. "As people walk this path, and see the history of our people, I hope it will also be a path that will help us go into the future, and preserve the knowledge of the past for the future."