Downtown Blocks Testing

Historic-period features found beneath parking lots in downtown Tucson

Testing on Blocks 174 and 175 in downtown Tucson demonstrated that historic period features were preserved beneath paved parking lots. Nearly 100 features dating from the American Territorial period and the early American Statehood period (1870s to the 1940s) were discovered in a sequence of backhoe strip trenches, and many of them could be correlated with buildings shown on Sanborn Fire Insurance maps produced between 1883 and 1949. The project demonstrated that cultural resources are likely to be preserved in urban settings except where basements have been placed. The surviving features provide information that is often unlikely to be preserved in contemporary documents.