But one in the parking lot dating to around 900, which was found under a corner of the Presidio wall, may be kept uncovered and turned into an interpretive exhibit where people can see the actual remains, Thiel said. The pit house in the back yard of the triplex will be studied, covered with protective cloth and filled back in with dirt. 'Everywhere we looked, we found evidence,' Thiel said. 750 to 900, have also been found in the parking lot behind the triplex, near the Main Library and under the lawn of City Hall. Other pit houses from the same era and from the age of the Hohokam, about A.D. 'That is a new find we didn't realize habitation went back that far,' she said.

Older pit houses have been found west of Congress by 'A' Mountain, but this is one of the oldest found east of the Santa Cruz River, McCune said. 'It's from the early agricultural period, so that was a surprise,' said Marty McCune, historic-preservation officer for the city of Tucson. The pit house in the back yard is a significant discovery. 'If you close your eyes, you can feel things are going on in there,' he said. Interrupting a stroll down Court Avenue to take a peek inside, Lawrence Steen aptly summed up the feeling of the place. Inside the three front rooms, Thiel has found layers of history: a pit house and pottery made by the Hohokam as early as the 750s the largest-ever excavation of trash and debris from the Presidio era, 1775-1850, revealing residents may have been eating horses, cats and dogs the head of a porcelain doll, a packet of Dukes Cameo Cigarettes and other evidence of more modern habitation. It's proved to be a treasure-trove in itself. The triplex, the abode of noted seamstress Soledad Jacomé and her six daughters from 1866 to 1911, will eventually be a museum in the Presidio Historic Park, a Rio Nuevo project reconstructing a tower of the Presidio fort at its original site. This tells us this same spot was lived in for 2,000 years,' said Thiel, project director for Desert Archaeology Inc., the firm hired to shore up the interior of a mid-19th-century triplex at 196 N. Then archaeologist Homer Thiel mentions that this is the remains of a pit house built 2,000 years ago, well before the time of the Hohokam, and forms begin to jell - an arced pattern where posts once held up a roof, linear depressions where walls stood. The shallow trenches and holes in the dirt, roped off in the back yard of an old adobe row house Downtown, seem at first like nothing more than the work of a diligent child playing in the mud. 2,000-year-old pit houses there before Hohokam

Hohokam pit house