Apologies to my readers for the delay in blog posts recently. The demands of the “day job” took up all available time. Then the need to get off the treadmill led my wife and I to seize some time off: a driving trip to Arizona, which brought me back to a face-to-face with history again! The photo below was taken outside the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix. It shows part of an adobe compound constructed by indigenous peoples some 2,000 years ago. Such structures reflect the kinds of communities found by the first Europeans to arrive in what we today call the American Southwest.

I was reminded of examples of masonry practiced by the original indigenous residents of San Diego County. The people we now know as the Kumeyaay inhabited San Diego County and the Baja Peninsula when the first Europeans came in 1769. These indigenous people had been on the local scene for approximately 2,700 years prior.

You can learn more about this early history of San Diego County this Saturday at the Rancho Bernardo History Museum in the Bernardo Winery. One of my duties as a volunteer at the Rancho Bernardo Historical Society is coordinating the society’s monthly Speakers Series. Our speaker on June 8 will be Cindy Stankowski, executive director of the San Diego Archaeological Center. Her topic will be: “10,000 Years: The Prehistory of the San Diego Region.” Admission is free to the public.  For more info visit https://rbhistory.org/events/speakers/ ,