Lost Pima Himeri Village Unearthed Beside Kino's Cocóspera Mission — Sonora, Mexico

Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) announced on July 7, 2026, the discovery of a Pima Himeri village that had lain hidden for more than 300 years beneath a mesquite grove roughly 100 meters from the ruins of the Mission Nuestra Señora del Pilar y Santiago de Cocóspera, founded by Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1687. The excavation, led by archaeologist Tomás Pérez Reyes as part of the Ímuris–Nogales Railway Salvage Project, covered roughly 800 square meters in the Cocóspera Valley of the Sierra de Sonora, between the towns of Ímuris and Cananea. Findings included adobe houses blending Spanish and Indigenous construction techniques with central hearths, roughly 20 outdoor cooking ovens, stone arrowheads showing the Pima continued traditional hunting and weapon technologies after contact, shell ornaments traded from the Gulf of California, and Christian crosses and religious medals alongside faunal remains (cattle, pigs, sheep, deer, dogs, chickens, turkeys) and cultivated maize, amaranth, cactus, and quelites. Archaeologist Júpiter Martínez Ramírez said the assemblage documents 'the resistance, transformation and cultural adoption of the Pima people in the face of the implementation of the missionary system' — physical evidence of how Indigenous communities in Kino's Pimería Alta missions (1687–1711) selectively adapted to, and pushed back against, Jesuit colonization of northern Sonora.