KVIG Informative

Archaeologists dug against a rising reservoir in the 1920s and 1930s to save what they could of an ancient pueblo complex in Nevada’s Moapa Valley before Lake Mead swallowed it. A century later, the federal government is working against a deadline of its own — one that opened this September — to send what those crews carried away back to the people it belongs to.

Fay and John Perkins, brothers from Overton, found artifacts in the Moapa Valley in 1924, according to a finding aid for the Pueblo Grande de Nevada manuscript collection held by UNLV Special Collections. Nevada Gov. James G. Scrugham, who served from 1923 to 1927, learned of the discovery and contacted archaeologist Mark Raymond Harrington, then employed by the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York, the finding aid states.

Harrington directed excavations at the site from 1924 into 1938, using Civilian Conservation Corps crews and Zuni laborers, according to the UNLV finding aid. The Museum of the American Indian funded the early digs; the National Park Service took over that funding in 1934, the finding aid states. Harrington named the ruins Pueblo Grande de Nevada. The popular press later called them the Lost City, according to the Lost City Museum’s own published history.

People lived in the settlement from roughly 300 to 1100 A.D., according to Nevada State Historical Marker No. 41, maintained by the State Historic Preservation Office. The marker describes several hundred pithouses, campsites, rockshelters, salt mines and caves spread across the valley, where residents irrigated fields of corn, beans and squash, wove cotton cloth, painted pottery and mined salt and turquoise to trade with tribes on the coast. Later construction included single-story adobe structures with as many as 100 rooms, according to the same marker. The UNLV finding aid lists Basketmaker, Hisatsinom, Puebloan and Paiute communities among those who inhabited the valley across that span.

Lake Mead, formed after the completion of Hoover Dam, submerged the settlement’s most developed sections, according to both the state historical marker and the Lost City Museum’s history. The National Park Service built a museum on the high ground that survived, using Civilian Conservation Corps labor, in 1935, according to the museum’s history. It opened as the Boulder Dam Park Museum, built to hold the artifacts Harrington’s crews had pulled from the flood zone.

The National Park Service transferred the museum to the State of Nevada in the mid-1950s, when it took its current name, the Lost City Museum, according to the museum’s history. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and operates today as one of Nevada’s state museums under the Nevada Division of Museums and History.

Donate

Donate

The National Park Service published a Notice of Inventory Completion for the Lost City Museum in the Federal Register on Aug. 3, 2026. The notice identifies the remains of 20 individuals and eight lots of associated funerary objects — pottery sherds, dog burials, bone dice, turquoise beads, shell beads, an amaranth seed cake and mule deer antler — recovered from excavations at the museum’s affiliated sites, according to the notice.

Those excavations ran from the 1930s through 1987 at sites the notice names as Anasazi-2, the Lewis Site, the Bunker Hill Site, the Adam 2 Site, Keo Site No. 1, Cappalappa No. 1 and Robison No. 1, all in the Overton area, the notice states. After consulting the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians and the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, the National Park Service determined the remains and objects are culturally affiliated with the Hopi Tribe of Arizona, according to the notice. It is the second such inventory covering Lost City Museum holdings; the first ran in the Federal Register on Nov. 21, 2000, the notice states. Repatriation may begin on or after Sept. 2, 2026, the notice states.

Donate

Donate

Harrington’s crews worked against a dam’s construction schedule in the 1930s. The National Park Service is now working against a federal repatriation window that opened this month. Ninety years after the water started rising over Pueblo Grande de Nevada, the individuals its excavators removed from the ground are still waiting to go home.