Coronado: The New Evidence

[announcer] This program is made possible by Circle Z ranch, an Arizona Dude Ranch, offering all inclusive horseback riding vacations for 98 years.

Learn more at circleZ.com [dramatic music] - There's a high likelihood that this is a Coronado period structure, either a residence or a church.

We're right on the edge of the battle Your ancestor came up this wash, everybody was shooting at everybody.

We are finding arrowheads from your ancestors, inside the structure and outside, it's like a pin cushion.

This makes this the first successful Native American rebellion in the continental US.

People didn't come back for 150 years - There's just a lot to learn.

We almost lost this whole Sobaipuri history.

- This is controversial, there's no question, but I have what I have.

- It is the find of the century, if I may put it that way.

In my mind.

[gentle music] [voices vocalizing] - [Speaker] We're going down the slop it's walking on marbles.

- Oh, yeah.

So be careful here because it's real easy to slip.

If you slip, fall on your butt, it's the least damage.

For most people anyway.

No one has been able to find a Coronado site in Arizona or Sonora.

We know where they started.

We know where they ended up.

There's sites in New Mexico.

There's sites in Texas, but not in Arizona.

Why have we not been able to find 'em - Okay, this is ridiculous.

- [Speaker] Go around.

[instruments whizzing] - Oh, that sounds like something.

We had no knowledge or basis to provide a guideline, a guidepost as to where he went in that several hundred mile stretch.

So we have this vast expanse, where people have been inferring, and speculating as to where Coronado went.

[gentle music] - It's needle in the haystack stuff.

It's very difficult to find.

What it takes is passion.

And that's what it takes to be a good archeologist.

And Deni has plenty of passion, and so that's why she's here.

And she's put in years on these Sobaipuri sites.

And because of that, because she had that background, because she'd been digging in these little ephemeral sites, that are so hard to define for so long, that's what put her here.

[coins jangling] - One of the reasons it's been so hard to find Coronado, basically people assumed that you weren't going to have enough artifacts to be able to identify where Coronado camped, and his people camped where the expedition camped, for just overnight.

- From an archeological perspective, how can you move almost 3,000 people with cattle, through any area and not leave some remnant of it?

And so from an archeological perspective, it's how do you find these things?

And how do you retrace the route?

- The documents are important to guide you to where these sites might be.

And so the combination of both the historical research, as well as the archeology on the ground, those two need to go hand in hand, with this particular project.

- I was investigating the Juan Bautista de Anza Trail.

No archeologists have has ever worked with the historians in identifying campsites.

There's so much that can be learned from campsites.

So I was looking up for what horseshoes, for example, and caught wind of a horseshoe, and a nail that someone had found in this general area.

The county is all I knew.

I found them in the museum case in the dark, in the back, and nobody knew what they were.

I was so excited.

I was just like...

I don't get that excited.

Archeologists see a lot of stuff, we don't get very excited.

But I was very excited.

I couldn't wait.

So they let me take them out of the museum, and we didn't know where they were from.

It makes sense now that we know, but it's so far further west than everybody was thinking.

And I've been working here, for 20, 25 years at this very spot.

And because I didn't expect it here, and wasn't specifically looking for it, I didn't see it.

Got to figure out where the road goes across.

Let's see.

But I did a terrain analysis, and remembered talking to this landowner, and figured out where it could be.

The first day out we checked that land form, and that land form, it was so hot.

Let's see, the third artifact I found, was a caret-head nail.

Then we found several more, metal detect the same area, and in the same hole, as a caret-head nail, found a crossbow bolt head.

And that cinched it, the expert and New Mexico verified the caret-head nail.

And then he said, "If you find one of these five things, nobody will ever be able to question what you found."

And it's been incredible since then, just thing after thing after thing.

[metal detector buzzing] Nice loud.

Okay, so let's get that loose out over there.

Here we go.

- [Speaker] Oh, wow.

- Look at that.

Is that not far out?

Is that not incredible?

- [Speaker] That's awesomely, incredibly astonishing.

- [Deni] No one has touched this for 480 years.

- [Speaker] That is awesome.

- We've always thought that the Coronado expedition went up the parallel San Pedro River rather than the Santa Cruz.

So this is really remarkable.

- There's only been two people in history who have suggested that it was on the Santa Cruz, but everybody's dismissed those scholars.

That's why the Coronado National Monument was placed on the San Pedro is because all historians, and many archeologists had the consensus that it was the San Pedro, that they made that decision.

So I have even published on it and I was wrong.

- It seems to me that the San Pedro drainage, off to the east, was more or less figured, well, it has to be here.

It's the straightest, it's wet, it gets from point A to point B in a fairly direct fashion.

She's done a lot of field work over there, and no one really came up with the appropriate artifacts, and actually the appropriate archival research, which she's done quite a lot of.

- I'll be honest, I'm pretty stunned.

We've been spending a lot of time, a lot of years, focusing on the documentary history, trying to integrate it with the artifact history, and to understand exactly where these people went.

This blows my priors to smithereens.

And that's a good thing, right?

From a purely scholarly perspective, it's good.

[gentle music] - So one of the problems we have is magnetic rocks, - [Speaker] A lot of igneous rock that has magnetite in it, and gives us a false reading.

Well, it's a positive reading, but not our target.

- Quite often we find magnetic rocks, and sometimes they're even louder than the artifacts that we're looking for in many cases.

[metal detector buzzing] - Oh, there's a good hit.

Yeah, right there.

[instrument beeps] Oh, yeah.

Whoa.

A caret-head nail.

- [Deni] What you got?

- I got a caret-head nail.

- [Deni] Let me look.

- Whoa.

- Oh, it is, man.

This is one of the most characteristic artifacts of Coronado.

There's a variety of names, one of them is caret-head nail.

It's a unique nail that does not occur in this area, after 1540, after Coronado.

I've been working this area for 35 years, all of southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, southern Texas.

There's nothing like this except around Coronado sites.

This verifies that this locus, that this area we're in right now, this cluster of artifacts is in fact Coronado.

It can't be anything else.

This little, minimal nail.

Is that not incredible?

- A lot of times a lot of these sites are missed, because traditional archeological surveys, doing a pedestrian survey will walk over a site, and if something's buried, you're not going to see it.

A metal detector is a tool in the toolbox, and it should be employed by professional archeologists, because what your eyes don't see, it sees for you in the ground.

- Today, we have a number of Coronado experts, who came out to the site.

They're archeologists, and a historian and a few other people.

The archeologists that came out have metal detected, probably all or most if not all, of the Coronado sites that are known.

They've seen a lot of artifacts.

This is the way that archeologists convey to others what they found.

And this is how people are convinced about what is found.

- Basing the route of Coronado, is a matter of connecting the dots.

And every time we find a dot, it gives us some new information to refine the estimates of where he went.

And the other exciting aspect of this is it changes the standard story.

And that in and of itself is going to create a lot of excitement, a lot of controversy.

- You have to be open to the evidence.

Egos are always in the way.

And this has been true of academics forever.

This controverts many of the received truths that have been held about the Coronado expedition, for a hundred years.

It would be very unscientific to refute it.

Bring me the evidence, I'll challenge it.

You bring me more evidence, and eventually the preponderance of the evidence points to what the truth is.

[gentle music] - Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, he was selected by the viceroy to do this exploration.

His wife was quite wealthy, and that's how he was able to support this expedition.

[gentle music] Well, basically what you had is you had about 80, 90 people going ahead with Coronado, checking out the route, checking where the water holes were, and seeing where the trail was going to take them, and seeing if there were any dangerous spots, like ambush locations and such.

- But by and large, these expeditions were broken into pieces.

They were a scattering of people across, sometimes as much as a thousand miles.

And you had couriers going back and forth, up and down the chain as it were, from Mexico City all the way to Kansas, and back all along the route.

- We're still in the middle of all the analysis, and the field work.

But it looks like what happened, is there was just multiple waves of people coming through, because there wouldn't have been enough water for all of 'em to come through at one time, because they had thousands of livestock, and thousands of people.

- So you get people on foot herding cattle, and sheep across unknown territory, who knows where they're going to go Okay?

And Coronado sent out individuals, or small search parties along the way, to explore different places.

One of 'em discovered Grand Canyon.

So there were people from the Coronado expedition, moving around and going to all kinds of places.

So I think we really have to get over this idea that there's one route that they all went up.

Okay?

Because clearly here, it just disproves that notion.

- Coronado did not find what he was looking for at all.

In fact, I think in a horse race, he fell off the horse, hit his head.

These people had put everything they owned into this.

It was a huge disappointment.

It really did set the frontier back.

So this will add to that story.

- So we have a geophysicist out here today, and he's going to try several different methods going across our excavation area and outside, where we've estimated, so he can see what's under the ground, in essence.

There's archaic, Hohokam, Kino, Spanish colonial, there's Civil War there's everything here through time.

And so the whole goal here, is we're trying to be very careful when we dig the targets.

And we're also trying to get everything, so that not only do we not lose Coronado, and treasure hunters come in ultimately, but also so that they don't come in, and destroy what else is there.

[voices chattering] - No, there's blood already.

- You're bleeding.

- I'm bleeding.

[voices chattering] - [Speaker] I just called 911.

- [Chris] Deni's done a good job of showing us how everyday people can make important contributions to understanding our history.

And so what we now call public archeology , has become more and more commonplace.

What's that thing on top?

- I don't know.

It's hooked on, but okay, so this is the end of it.

[gentle music] What in the world is there?

Oh, wow.

And Chris and I are sitting here just realizing, what a unique moment this is for ourselves, and for history, actually.

We're trying to take in the moment.

- [Chris] Yeah.

Somebody's at the gate, I think, the doc.

[gentle music] - [Deni] This is incredible.

What'd you say?

- [Chris] I said, just a little, I never thought I find anything like this.

- [Deni] Yeah, we think it's a hand cannon at this point.

We don't know.

- Here it is.

- [Deni] Woo hoo.

Oh, look at that.

It's an arquebus.

No, but it flares out at the end.

Oh, look at that.

Let's get some photos.

- Holy moly.

God.

Look at that.

Look at this.

Man.

To hell with the helmets and stuff.

- This is our pride and joy.

This tells us Coronado was here, as much as any caret-head nail or bolthead.

This is what you call a wall gun.

It's a medieval gun.

It probably would've had wood on the end.

We found this, at our site, and I mean, it's mind blowing.

[gentle music] And so this is really a unique piece.

So you are the first to see this of anyone, outside of our closely held group.

Yeah.

So here it is.

- Whoa.

- Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

- That's pretty, pretty, pretty good, What we're going to do, when we use the portable x-ray fluorescence, is it will take a reading of the surface of the object.

It collects the information during that 60 seconds.

And got it.

And there is this copper, copper is interesting.

It's only about 84% copper.

- 83%.

- So what do we have here?

3%...

There it is.

There's your bronze.

3.7%.

- There you go.

Pretty incredible.

I mean, we thought it was probably bronze, but I just, I never thought that I would find a bronze artifact, especially something that incredible.

[gentle music] - [Karl] A wall cannon is just out of this world.

- [Toni] It's spectacular.

- And so it was all part of that same mystique of the southwest.

He was an exciting, exciting guy.

And gilded armor, plume on the helmet, the commander of all he surveyed.

- You add a Spanish conquistador with armor and helmet, followed by a host of Spanish military men, and native warriors and all of that.

My gosh, almighty, that's storybook stuff there.

And then you add gold, mystery and intrigue to it.

And I think that's one reason why Coronado has been in our minds for a long time.

[gentle music] [voices chattering] - If you like history to remain unchanging, this is not the talk for you.

If you want to read half century old history books, and feel satisfied that they got it right, this is not the talk for you.

We are working now on the evidence that this is the villa of San Geronimo III in the Suya Valley.

- She believes, and I agree with her that this is the site of a villa or a village, called San Geronimo III, which was a Spanish settlement that was associated with the Coronado expedition.

We have archival evidence, that there were actually three separate locations of San Geronimo, this would be the third one.

The first two we are pretty sure, are south of the border in Mexico.

- Suya, and these other places are called by historians, a garrison post, a supply depot, a base camp, a garrison town.

Coronado, Castaneda, and others, referred to San Geronimo III as a villa.

Each of the three San Geronimos, were referred to as villas repeatedly Importantly, many historians are assuming, that only men were present at the site as I suggested.

And some suggest that this was therefore not a settlement.

But first of all, we don't know this.

We don't know that there were just men there.

Women and wives are just often not mentioned.

We're usually invisible in historic documents.

I've written about that too, as have others.

But the archeology can tell us this.

The site was incredibly large.

It's a kilometer long, that's 10 football fields, a thousand yards or meters and 600 meters or yards wide, at least, it may be larger.

We're still in the process of working the site, and expanding its boundaries.

It has six lookout stations, three of which have been attacked and burned, and was abandoned seemingly maybe in February, 1542.

So there's a a nine to 12 month period of occupation here.

So what do we expect for the beginnings of a municipality?

As some say you'd expect a church, and an administrative building.

That's exactly what I'm expecting.

This indicates that they had a formal town structure.

The archeological record is starting to produce evidence along these lines, in that we have permanent rectangular structures, under Sobaipuri structures, that have Coronado artifacts in them and on the floor.

It had a town council, and permanent structures, and was referred to repeatedly as a villa, or town.

A villa or town was in fact the way that the viceroy and king, saw this place.

See how that's red right there?

- [Volunteer] Yeah.

- You're going to take your trowel, and you're going to go like this, and you're going to pull it back and only go down to that.

Okay?

So if you see an artifact, leave it in place.

- Okay.

- Okay?

The fun thing about this, is that this is a highly likely area to produce Spanish ceramics, and other artifacts related to the structure, because there's a metati right over there.

What we have here in this structure is we have Coronado, the fill of the structure about like this.

And on top we have 480 years.

So what we have is we have archaic, But we have hundreds if not thousands, of Coronado period artifacts here.

We have green glazed pottery, these are all European potteries.

We have pale green glass and clear glass, and early Ming period Chinese wear.

I did a little trench this way off the main trench, and hit some really unusual plain wear pottery.

And I dated it, luminescence dating 1550 plus or minus 30.

So that is really, that's the best you can get.

We have radiocarbon dates, that are consistent with the Coronado period.

We don't know what this structure is.

It could be the beginnings of a church, it could be a barracks, it could be the captain's house, it could be a variety of things.

Hopefully when, let's say some agency takes this over, and makes it a national monument or whatever they might do, people can actually see it.

[bright music] Right there.

That's good.

[bright music] Huh.

It's not doing too much is it?

So it now pegs it to the ground at a known site, that was occupied for thousands of years, including by the Sobaipuri O'odham, who are ancestors of the modern day O'odham.

Their ancestors were here, and greeted Coronado when he came through.

[voices chattering] So you do not want to brush up against any of these, with your nice clothes on.

I've ruined so many clothes out here.

I too am humbled by the experience, of being at this site.

I was before when we just knew, it was a Sobaipuri O'odham site.

And now that we know about this, it is just incredible.

And I am so pleased that you're here today to be able to share this because I've been so excited and I know you guys are too, about what's going on here.

- It's like the Spanish version of what happened and one book I read, I didn't agree with it, because it just sounded like the O'odham, when the Spaniards came here, that they just bent over backwards and fell on the ground, and worshiped them and all that.

But that's not exactly what happened.

- You guys can come all the way in if you want.

I'm just going to give you a little bit of orientation about the site to begin with.

What we have here is, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, the first Europeans to step foot in Arizona, and in the southwest, of course, Fray Marcos de Niza was before, 1539.

But this is considered part of the same expedition.

So it's really difficult to find Coronado sites.

So for me, as an archeologist, this is a big deal.

And the reason that I wanted you all involved, is because we are at, near, a Sobaipuri O'odham site.

So your direct ancestors are the people that greeted these first Europeans.

Of course that's important for a variety of reasons, some of which you can only fathom.

[dramatic music] But it turns out that this was a town, they established this town in 1541.

So this was a European settlement in 1541.

The significant thing about this too though, is that your ancestors lived nearby, very nearby.

And they got sick and tired of what the Europeans were doing.

And there was a major pitched battle here.

And I brought some artifacts, so that you can see some of them.

But basically what your ancestors did, was kick out the Europeans, and they didn't come back for 150 years.

In my view, that's something I would be proud of, if I was O'odham.

But one of the things that we've discussed for years, is that the O'odham of this time, the Sobaipuri O'odham, were the best warriors in the region.

In fact, that's apparently where the names Sobaipuri came from.

"Enemy like," "Apache like."

Well this is another example of that.

So as Tony, David, and I have been discussing, the idea of docile, peaceful, rolling over for the Spaniards and stuff, that's in contrast to what we see here.

So you can push 'em so far, and at a certain point then you stand up.

[dramatic music] [vocalists singing in foreign language] This makes this the first successful Native American rebellion in the continental US.

People didn't come back for 150 years.

That's significant.

But also, the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, they refer to that as the First American Revolution, because they kicked the Spaniards out there in New Mexico.

That makes this the first American revolution.

The battle, the first part of the battle, I think, happened in this arroyo right over here behind us.

We have crossbows bolthead, and Sobaipuri arrowheads going like this, on either side of the wash. We also have that over there and down there.

So it looks like your ancestors came up the wash, and up these arroyos into the heart of the settlement.

We know from the battle that no Sobaipuri were killed here.

That's how good your ancestors were.

Seriously.

Not a single one was killed.

We don't know how many Spaniards were killed.

We know two, three or a hundred based on the documents.

You can see there's quite a bit of variation.

I'll walk you over there.

It's right there.

It's an arroyo.

[bright music] [vocalist singing in foreign language] - I mean, I've been out here a lot of times, and every time I'm here I pick up something new.

And I'm glad that these young people came out here, the elders, and it's great to see people from our community.

Well, I think like as I mentioned, that our history was almost lost, and rather than read about it is to come out here, and see what it looked like, and feel what the weather is like, and see how people, their ancestors, lived out here and how they felt.

- That's actually a pretty good throw.

Yeah, if you could grab that for me.

- Now we're in the stage where we're trying to provide the evidence necessary to argue, with a hundred percent certainty, that it's the villa of San Geronimo III.

Everybody believes it's that, but they don't necessarily believe it's an actual villa or town.

We're going to be able to tell whether women and children were here.

We're going to be able to hopefully, tell the ethnic makeup of people here.

All of the natives, all of the domestic servants and slaves, and all the women and children, would've been invisible in the historic record.

'Cause they only mention Spanish men usually.

So that's what I'm trying to figure out, is how much of that can we see.

But another reason it's important, is it's probably the earliest European villa or settlement, in the southwest.

And it's one of the earliest ones in the entire nation, in the entire continental US.

Okay?

We have evidence of this settlement here.

- [Speaker] There you go.

- You can only hold it for a few more seconds.

Better hurry.

[all laugh] - [Speaker] Wow.

How heavy?

- You lift it on this end?

- [Deni] It's 40 pounds.

- [Speaker] 40 pounds, okay.

- [Deni] But it's heavier than it seems.

- This is another piece to our history.

- I believe that we now have an opportunity to change or to actually put forth the proper history, because now we have a voice in how the history will be written, because in the beginning we never had a say.

It was all one sided.

And in this case it was purely from the Spaniards, and what they wrote about.

And of course it was their views, and didn't include our views.

So we need to change all of that.

- The O'odham piece of what you've discovered here, I think it's exciting for me to hear you say that.

But then how willing are your peers willing to accept that?

We, the O'odham, have to understand, that comes the responsibility, comes an obligation.

We're going to need to make sure that our current day membership, and the membership yet to come, know and understand that.

We're going to get critics.

You already have your critics, you've already identified who they are, and they're going to do what they can to try discredit what you've been able to determine.

- And one of the things that I'm happy about what Deni's been doing with this site, is working with the local native community, to help in the excavation and identifying of it.

'Cause that's something that we like to see, because it is their history and they can help interpret it.

And she's always been very active in that, and to try to understand, and utilize the native knowledge.

[Tony Burrell speaking in foreign language] - So what I said was that being here means a lot to me.

Being here where the Sobaipuri O'odham lived, and where they have always lived and they were here, before the Spaniards came, - It's about them.

And history has never really been about them before.

In fact, a couple people said, normally natives are peripheral to the story.

Most people in the nation don't even know who the O'odham are.

And so the fact is this is a story that's not only important to them, it's important to Arizona, it's important to the southwest, it's important to America in general.

It's important internationally.

And here they're central to it.

It's part of the healing for these people.

[gentle music] "They had not found the kingdoms he had told about, neither populous cities nor the riches of gold, and precious stones that had been publicized, nor brocades nor other things that were mentioned from the pulpits."

[gentle music] Frank?

I don't want the battery to die.

Why don't you work in the road?

You like doing that stuff.

Right?

- [Frank] Sure.

- Yeah, he loves it.

- So David and Frank, we'll work along the road, and in the road.

What you got?

- [Speaker] Looks good.

- Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

- Is it a point?

- I believe you have found another iron bolthead.

- [Frank] Yeah, a bolthead.

- You think so?

- I do think so.

- Wow.

- I believe that's what that is.

- [Frank] I would call it that too.

- Yeah, it's got a point.

- Wow.

Good job, right here.

So this is our take for the day, guys.

Let's see.

We got possible iron here, head nail.

Here's some shanks.

See that's why we think that was playing with horses.

That was fixing horseshoes.

Good day, huh?

- Good find, guys.

- Good day, yeah.

- [Speaker] Winter solstice.

- Yeah.

[gentle music] We have substantial features indicating major construction and permanent features.

A sizable rectangular structure with a foundation or lower walls of stone and mud has been identified.

The wall gun was in this structure that I'm talking about.

It was resting on the floor.

We have one opportunity to get this right.

It's such an important structure, because there's only one structure in the world, where there's a Coronado wall gun sitting on the floor of a structure and this is it.

So I got to get it right.

[gentle music] [tools scraping] The problem that we have is, I'm right in the middle of this excavation.

I don't want to rush it.

And I only have so many volunteers, and I can only use so many volunteers each day, because I want a controlled chaos rather than, just out of control.

So what we have to do here, before the wind comes up this morning, is we have to get the fabric laid out, plastic on top of it, and then some dirt to hold it down, and just slide it right along there.

There you go.

See what I'm saying?

So when that one comes over, that'll have slack too.

- And this part, is that right?

- That's right where it needs to be.

Just along the edges though, in case we have to revise.

Huh?

No.

[gentle music] - There's not an official journal or diary.

You had individuals years later, recounting what they did out here.

You just put in your blood, sweat and tears, and you follow up on leads.

It's a challenge.

It's a four dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Try to figure this out now.

- The route trajectory, this is probably what everybody's been waiting for, really.

We first tested and then accepted that this was Suya.

We tested in a variety of ways, and then this and two other sites that we have, that are quite a distance away, have serious implications for a new route trajectory.

In contrary to what the naysayers have already pronounced, even though they don't know the facts, this does in fact change the route trajectory significantly.

Let me say that again.

It does change the route trajectory significantly.

[gentle music] And here we are out in the San Bernardino Valley again, and we just got permission to cross private land, to go look at the rock art, that we believe is Coronado related.

This is pretty rugged terrain.

I wonder if the Sobaipuri, or whoever took 'em out here, didn't take 'em out here just to get them lost like everybody thinks they did on the plains.

This is pretty desolate territory, and without a lot of water, between here and the next waterfall.

- [Chris] Very dry, very desolate, and five miles north of the border.

- [Deni] We're walking about a mile and a quarter, mile and a half, something like that.

And get to the canyon edge and then go in, and then we'll start going up on the other side.

And that's where it's supposed to be.

This is why they had to turn, why the rock art is where it is because of this.

You could not walk on your horses.

Of course you could be up on the side but you certainly couldn't walk up this drainage.

It's really difficult to walk by foot with your boots on.

So we found it.

You can see it through the brush here, and we're going up to it right now.

Ouch.

[Deni grunts] Wow.

Yeah, that's clearly it.

It's really clear.

Ow.

I'm stuck in the bushes.

There we go.

Wow.

Wowee.

That's bigger than I thought.

That's cool.

- [Frank] Ow, sorry.

- Yeah, me too.

These are pretty nasty.

Okay.

And see there's a piece off that I'm going to look for.

Wow.

Is that not incredible?

- [Deni] So this is the rock art we've been looking for.

- And it has got various ages of petroglyphs on it.

And what's really interesting here, is not only is it on the front, and the ones that you can see, but we've got a name over here on the side.

I thought I could see something in the photo that was given to me.

And here we got a name and an X.

It looks like it says "TO," maybe "LLOI."

or "L." Who knows what that is.

And there's a lot more detail that I can see in this now in person.

So this is really quite intriguing.

We've got some motion happening I think, and then something going on down here at the bottom.

So very interesting.

But I think they were trying to get out of this boulder field.

It's pretty nasty, and out of that wash, so we'll see.

So here we are.

We had a very successful day.

- Second expedition.

- Yeah.

And we found the rock art seven months to the day after we started on the other site.

And so I think it's pretty clear, I would be so shocked if this is not Coronado.

- It's Coronado.

Says so right on the rock.

- Yeah and there's a name scratched in it, so we're going to look that up.

That wasn't clear from the other photos.

[gentle music] One problem is that I assumed that his name was Tovar, even though I knew that V and B are interchangeable.

But he signed his name with a "B."

"T-o-b-a-r." We know that from a signature that's surviving, even though most of his documents have been lost.

Show you exactly what I came up with.

[gentle music] He was responsible for bringing the people from San Geronimo II to San Geronimo III, and determining where the settlement was going to be.

- [Frank] Most people think of archeologists, as sitting in their easy chairs, smoking cigars, coming up with lofty theories, but that ain't what it's about.

It's about getting dirty, getting dusty, getting filthy, getting dead tired, working long, long hours, to extract little bits of information Deni has devoted her life to this area and doing these sorts of things.

- Hey guys, I'm headed down a little bit.

There's a flat down here.

[funny music] [instrument beeps] Shotgun, man.

Shotgun.

God.

All over.

That's all I'm getting is wire and cartridges.

Few other odds and ends.

[funny music] Lead.

[metal detector buzzing] So we're here in this clearing, near the edge of the landform, overlooking the cienega.

Probably a lookout station.

So far, there's just one clearing.

[instrument beeping] It's right under that piece of grass.

You can be a little bit more rigorous than that but... Ok, so it's a lead.

We got a lead ball.

- [Speaker] Oh, good.

That's a couple we'd find on the other one.

- Amazing.

- Got Coronado.

I can't freaking believe it.

Look at that.

This is absolutely incredible.

A medieval horseshoe.

Actually it's a mule shoe.

Look at that.

It's small.

A medieval mule shoe here on the quarry.

Is that not incredible?

Right where I predicted, across... - [Speaker] I was just going to say, this is where you predicted.

Yes?

- Yeah.

- [Speaker] And you predicted it based on?

- The topography and the water.

Just everything about how they would've used the landscape.

And so my predictions are working, so we're going to find Coronado in places.

If he was there, I'll pick the right land forms.

- [Speaker] You've gotten into his mind.

- Yeah.

Or he's in mine.

- [Speaker] Or he's in yours.

- Ha, is this not incredible?

Look at that.

- [Speaker] That is just awesome.

- We have three metal artifacts.

Well, we had four.

One was a .22, A mule shoe frag... and a lead ball, could be Coronado.

The mule shoe is, the lead ball could be.

And then there's a piece of spent lead, that I have to take a better look at.

But this seems to be the clearing they used for their overnight encampment.

We haven't entirely figured out the route, because as we've seen, historians have been guessing about it for 200 years or more and they've all gotten it wrong.

There are hundreds, literally hundreds of combinations, of options for how they went and where they went.

And we cannot claim a place as a Coronado location without archeological evidence.

We're actually on the trail, and soon I think we're going to have it figured out.

- What she's going to continue to need is grit.

This is not easy country to work in.

The sites are not easy to identify.

Deni is well researched on the topic.

She's followed the route along the way, perhaps getting Coronado to Zuni.

I'd like to see the trail on a map.

I think all of that's possible.

If she's not there, she's going to be very close to it.

- The accounts actually do come together, but not in the ways that I had previously understood, or other people had understood.

The way they make sense, the way to make sense of what they're actually saying, is to know that our site is Suya, and then everything falls into place.

We're right on the edge of the battle And that's when you know you have a good fit.

When everything falls into place, when you backtrack through the documentary record, and it also fits with the archeological record, and geography and so on.

- Since she has made this discovery, rebellion in the continental US.

it's starting to fit all the pieces together.

It fits very well with the archival records.

The archeology clearly shows that this is a mid 1500s site, which is the earliest Spanish site in the southwest.

So it's part of the Coronado expedition.

That was the only expedition that we have firm records of, came through this area in the 1530s, 1540s.

- It's the result of remarkable persistence in the face of some resistance and some cheering.

It's certainly been a long haul to track all this down.

And then of course the cannon relatively sealed that deal and should put the doubters in the closet and throw away the key.

- Deni, with her enthusiasm and her knowledge, and her attitude, and her willingness to be excited, this has really been been great, and it's truly nostalgic for me.

But more important, it lets me see what she's doing.

And I'm so thrilled by that.

- Because this is so, predominantly Spanish history and native history, it gets pushed to the side.

There's not that many people studying it.

There's a limited view into it.

And so this work, not only the archeology and the history, but working with the O'odham on this has an opportunity to blow it wide open and to not only make it more relevant, to more people, but also change the story.

- What the combination of history, and archeology does, is it feeds you to people.

It brings the archeology to life, and it brings the history to life in two different ways.

And when you can do that, you have a real story.

And this is a new story.

People don't know this story.

- [Deni] This is equivalent to Roanoke, equivalent to Jamestown, San Augustine and all those places.

This is a major point in the history of the southwest, the history of Arizona, the history of the nation, right?

The history of the continent.

I mean, it truly is that monumental because it's different.

It's very different than what people have been saying.

- What impresses me about this site and Deni Seymour's work, is that she has what many of us have been looking for, and that is physical remains or artifacts.

that securely date to the 1540s.

That's hard to beat.

There are still lots of questions about which route did Coronado take?

Did his entourage take several different routes?

Was he here?

Was he somewhere else, while other people in his entourage were here?

Those are all questions that need answers and it's fun to look for the answers to those kinds of questions.

- How often is it that you have descendant populations, who their ancestors had first contact with white Europeans and their communities still persist, and they still have their language, and they still have many of their traditions.

That's rare.

This site, this find, this Coronado site is actually, it, it's the find of my lifetime.

It's the find of the lifetime, of a lifetime.

It's really the holy grail in terms of historical archeology.

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