Not many American big cities, especially in the West, can show off stuff in the ground from the 1770s right in the middle of downtown.

What sets Tucson apart even more is that history from 2,400 years keeps getting found in the ground in the shadows of skyscrapers.

“There aren’t many places I can think of where you can see archaeology in the ground right in the spot of where the town was founded,” said Homer Thiel, project director at Desert Archaeology. He offered his short list: Fort Michilimackinac in Michigan and Pointe-à-Calliere in old-town Montreal.

At the half-acre site where the rebuilt presidio now stands, Thiel’s team found traces of three early agricultural-period pit houses – small circles with postholes around the edges dating back 2,000 to 2,400 years. The team retrieved two spear points and grinding stones from that era, dug up about 18 inches to 3 feet below street level.

Archaeology then fast-forwards 750 years to the Hohokam period, which revealed six rectangular pit houses with plastered floors about 2 feet down. “We found a lot of pottery,” Thiel said.

Thiel said archaeologists found hundreds of thousands of items on the half-acre site at Washington Street and Church Avenue, and much of downtown would reveal similar finds with a little digging.

The Hohokam period ran from 750 to 1150, and then archaeology fast-forwards again, about 600 years this time, to the arrival of the Spanish in 1775 and the presidio.

“In the park location, we have the tower foundation and a portion of the east wall,” Thiel said.

They found majolica shards from the “dishes they would eat meals on.” Musket balls and gun flints were unearthed, as were Native American pottery and a double-sided, fine-tooth comb from Europe.

“It was so finely toothed, you could remove lice eggs from someone’s head,” Thiel said.

Next comes the first above-ground history – the Siqueiros-Jacomé row house from 1866, the triplex facing Court Avenue. Four pits dug for adobe were filled with trash, mostly needles, safety pins and buttons stemming from Soledad Jacomé’s seamstress trade.

The Dodge family in the 1890s built a boarding house facing Washington Street that stood until 1959.

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