BEHIND PRADO DAM, ARCHAEOLOGIST DIBBLE PRESERVES CENTURIES OF HERITAGE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

Steve Dibble standing next to remnants of a adobe wall.

Today, after decades of exposure to rain, wind and sun, what was once the elegant Bandini-Cota home is little more than a Proustian remembrance of things past.

Which is just the way Dibble likes it.

Since he joined the L.A. District in 1987, Dibble has kept one steel-toed boot firmly rooted in the mists of history, the other poised on the brink of whatever 21st century project the District is managing. Like his archaeological colleagues in the District and Division, Dibble scientifically straddles ancient and modern eras to ensure that Corps projects comply with laws preserving the nation’s heritage.

The Bandini-Cota adobe is part of what the District calls “the hidden history of Prado Basin.” Over the years, Dibble and his archaeological colleagues have discovered and protected several other artifacts—some stretching back nearly 5,000 years to when the first humans apparently came a-hunting in the area. Most of the artifacts are of much more recent vintage—a century and a half or so—but all 22 prehistoric sites and 200-plus historic sites show the Corps commitment to keeping them safe.

“We thought it was just an historic site,” Dibble recalls, “and ranching has been here since the early 20th century. But when we did test excavation, we found prehistoric remains up on a little rise.”

Beginning in the early 1980s, when the Corps decided to raise Prado Dam by 25-plus feet (a project just now getting underway), the District contracted an archaeological team to sift through the land that would be affected. By the mid-’80s, what Dibble calls “magnetic anomalies” had been discovered by using a proton magnetometer, which measures the intensity of a magnetic field. “We had archaeological evidence that there might be a cemetery,” he recalls. “There might be as many as 90 or as few as 10, 20 or 30 caskets out there.”

Such scrupulous concern emerged Corps-wide after passage of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. Before that law, which required (among other things) that federal agencies document, evaluate and maintain an inventory of historic properties, the Corps had little use for archaeology. It applied the science in a crisis, before land might be flooded behind a dam, for instance.

After the law, and especially after Congress allowed federal agencies to earmark 1% of a project’s cost for archaeological work, the Corps entered the field in earnest. Ever since, as Americans gained a sense of their cultural and environmental heritage, the Corps has been in the vanguard of identifying and saving archaeological resources.

The Rincon area behind Prado Dam proved to be an exceptionally fertile—and complex—archaeological dig. Centuries ago, Gabrieleno Indians lived above the Santa Ana River. Spanish settlers followed, tilling and ranching on land grants. In the 19th century, a village called Rincon, “the corner,” came to life along the Santa Fe Railroad line.

By 1938, the town, now called Prado (“meadow”), had about 200 people, a few stores, post office, school, depot, pottery kilns, a gas station and other structures. Then one of the 20th century’s worst floods in southern California swept over Prado and surged through Orange County, killing dozens and leaving devastation in its wake. Prado Dam, built by the Corps in 1941, ensured that the land in front of it all the way to the ocean would become the megapolis it is today.

Behind the dam, near the junction of the 71 and 91 Freeways, was a different story. Rincon/Prado lay fallow for decades, until the dam elevation plan refocused attention on its history. Former and current residents became interested in what once had been there; to find it, they needed help.

They got it from the District. A January 2003 Los Angeles Times article put it this way: “Archaeologists from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dug up the buried life of a frontier town, retrieving the everyday objects that gave the place its soul, from ketchup and pepper bottles at the old restaurant on Main Street to fragments of the pottery that Mexican immigrants sold at roadside.”

And ever since he came to the District, Dibble has been in the middle of finding the record of these lives, hidden beneath layers of silt. “Every time they dig out here, they call me out,” he says.

Dibble and his crews apply the highest-of-tech methods—GPS devices, aerial photography—and the lowest—pushing topsoil aside with shovels (one team of a dozen members did this for a month). One of the main digs uncovered a unique cluster of Mexican pottery kilns, used by potters from the Mexican states of Jalisco and Chihuahua. They arrived in the 1920s and molded vessels from the basin’s clay beds, firing them in round brick kilns, then selling them at roadside stands. Archaeologists have discovered three of the kilns, along with fragments of the pots, bowls and sculpted animal figurines. “Even though it’s only from the 20th century, it still gives you information about the people, their economy, ethnic groups,” Dibble explains. “This all adds to the written history of the area.”

Dibble “just fell into” archaeology, he says. For a while at Cal State Long Beach University, he was geology major, then switched to anthropology. After graduation, he didn’t exactly rush into the field, spending five years as a bartender at Moonraker’s in Irvine. He worked the day shift Monday-Friday, while pursuing a master’s degree, and enjoyed the experience. “There were regular customers, it was a good area,” he remembers. “I used to tell them my problems, and they’d tell me jokes.”

After stints with various area consulting firms, Dibble joined the Corps in 1987. But his bartending days had something in common with archaeology: “Both are kind of anthropological,” he says. “In one you’re dealing with stoned people.”

Under Dibble’s guidance, the District has generated hundreds of archaeological studies. One, “Ranching, Rails, and Clay: The Development and Demise of the Town of Rincon/Prado,” is a 238-page analysis of the prehistoric and historic records of the area.

“Senior Archaeologist D. Steven Dibble spearheaded the project for USACE and provided invaluable assistance in the form of maps, reports, resources and his special brand of expertise,” wrote the report’s author, Matthew A. Sterner of Statistical Research Inc., Tucson, Ariz. “Steve’s interest and genuine excitement for the cultural resources to be found in the Prado Basin was contagious from the first moment I met him. Today, I share Steve’s passion for the area and feel my heart race slightly when presented with the opportunity to visit or work in the basin.”

Those traits were in evidence when Dibble recently returned to what once had been Rincon/Prado. As he moved briskly through tall grass into a forest of eucalyptus trees, he paused, framing his hands into a square. “There’s the town,” he says, literally looking back in time. “I get real philosophical visualizing it. Imagine the people out here buried—they’re always going to be this way, and people today won’t forget about them or desecrate them in any way. That’s what gets me excited.”