Pueblo Grande de Nevada Manuscript Collection (MS-00208)

The Pueblo Grande de Nevada, also known as Nevada’s “Lost City,” was a Native American urban site occupied by Basketmaker, Hisatsinom, Puebloan (previously contextualized as Anasazi), and Paiute communities from 300 AD to 1150 AD. The city consisted of housing structures of 20 or more rooms, with one building containing more than 100 rooms. Adjacent to the city were salt mines that indigenous communities mined for trade throughout the region. The Pueblo Grande de Nevada site was flooded during the creation of Hoover Dam's Lake Mead reservoir. The collection's materials relate to archaeological data associated with collecting and cataloging cultural objects before the reservoir's completion.

In 1924, John and Fay Perkins, two brothers from Overton, Nevada discovered artifacts in the Moapa Valley. The Perkins brothers notified Colonel James G. Scrugham, the Governor of Nevada from 1923-1927, of their findings. As more discoveries were made during 1924, and the increasing conversations over Hoover Dam and its accompanying reservoir put the sites at risk, Governor Scrugham contacted Mark Raymond Harrington, an archaeologist working with the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian (MAI) in New York City to record the sites before they were potentially ruined. Harrington traveled to the Moapa Valley and noted the historical importance of the archaeological findings. The MAI funded the initial years of Harrington's research, but in 1934 the National Park Service took over funding for the archaeological digs. Harrington used Civilian Conservation Corps labor (Company 974 and 573), and was also joined by Zuni workers, to preserve and catalog as many cultural items as possible before the valley was flooded for the creation of Lake Mead reservoir, which submerged the “Lost City” along with the town of St. Thomas, Nevada.

Harrington and his staff worked throughout the 1920s excavating, photographing, and cataloging the physical remains of burials, Native American cultural objects, and housing structures. Photographs and saved objects from numerous sites under Harrington’s management were housed in the Lost City Museum of Archaeology (formerly the Boulder Dam Park Museum) located in Overton, Nevada.

References:

“The Lost City.” The National Park Service website, accessed on August 15, 2018. https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-lost-city.htm

Harry, Karen G. and James T. Watson. “The Archaeology of Pueblo Grande de Nevada: Past and Current Research within Nevada’s ‘Lost City.’” Kiva, 75:4 (Summer 2010): 403-424. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20799346.pdf