PAUL L. ALLEN, Tucson Citizen

There's a lot of history underfoot hereabout, what with Tucson continuously occupied for the past several thousand years.

And a lot of those who made that history are underfoot, as well.

That's because the community has found it necessary to leapfrog over a number of cemeteries as it has grown.

When J. Ross Browne visited Tucson in 1864, he described it as "a city of mud boxes, dingy and dilapidated, cracked and baked into a composite of dust and filth; littered about with broken corrals, sheds, bake-ovens, carcasses of dead animals, and broken pottery; barren of verdure, parched, naked and grimly desolate in the glare of a southern sun."

Population then was about 1,600. Who could have predicted, with such an inauspicious beginning, that the Old Pueblo would burgeon into the 25th-largest city in the country?

As we've grown, we've tended to build atop old burial areas.

Here are a few of them downtown:

 A "scattering" of prehistoric burials dating back 2,000 to 4,000 years at the base of "A" Mountain.

A cemetery thought to date from 1450 to 1700 just south of the intersection of 17th Street and South Ninth Avenue in Barrio Libre.

Two cemeteries associated with the 1750s-era Mission San Agustín south of Congress Street between "A" Mountain and the Santa Cruz River.

The Spanish presidio cemetery after 1775, near present-day Alameda and Church streets.

National Cemetery (Government Cemetery), between Alameda and Seventh streets and Stone and Sixth avenues, established in the early 1860s.

 Court Street Cemetery, bounded by Stone Avenue, Speedway Boulevard, Second Street and Main Avenue, established June 1, 1875.

Finally, in 1907, the Tucson Cemetery Association approved Evergreen and Holy Hope cemeteries on North Oracle road - substantially farther out of town than previously.

Building atop an abandoned cemetery wasn't a problem in an era when erecting new structures involved little more than aligning stones for a foundation and mortaring adobe blocks atop it into a wall. Those reposing subsurface could remain undisturbed.

But more-ambitious buildings of the modern day require more complex foundations and more and deeper digging.

So we have to concern ourselves with what - and who - will turn up in the process. And we know they're there.

Consider:

In the 1920s, 1960s, 1970s and 1990s, various construction and road-grading projects unearthed more than 100 burials in the Alameda-Stone area.

In 1931, flooding uncovered many Mission San Agustín burials.

In 1949-50, clay mining for bricks in the Mission San Agustín area destroyed 50 burials and archaeologists subsequently excavated nearly 100 more.

 In 1950, construction and excavation behind the old Tucson Newspapers Inc. building on Stone (atop part of the old National Cemetery) unearthed complete remains of 38 individuals and partial remains of about 54 more.

 In the 1950s, three burials were recovered from the 17th Street-Ninth Avenue site during sewer line work, and another three in 1995-96 during utility work there.

Individual burials turn up periodically throughout downtown when utility work requires digging - occasionally with embedded projectile points or awkward placement of the body that suggests a violent end.

Despite the fact that relatives of the departed were urged to move their family and friends to each "new" cemetery, most did not, and many of those buried no longer had relatives and friends living here.

We may get a feel for just how many remain underfoot within the next few months, as two new projects evolve atop two old cemetery sites. Plans proceed for a major city-county courts building in the Stone-Alameda area, approved in the 2004 county bond package.

And the city soon will ask for bids for an as-yet-to-be-determined development on a portion of the old Court Street Cemetery near Stone and Speedway.

Homer Thiel, historic archaeologist with Desert Archaeology Inc., said Catholic burials alone in that cemetery numbered 4,513, according to church records. He believes comparatively few of those originally buried there were moved to the Evergreen-Holy Hope cemeteries.

Linda Mayro, the county's cultural resources manager, said a series of meetings is being conducted with various ethnic and cultural groups to alert them that a sizable number of burials is likely to turn up during archaeological examination of the courts building site.

Marty McCune, the city's historic preservation officer, said a similar scenario is likely to take place at the Stone-Speedway site when preliminary archaeology is conducted there.

Paul L. Allen may be reached at 573-4588 and This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it For more history coverage, go to www.tucsoncitizen.com/history.

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