Verde Valley Archaeology Center and Museum Executive Director Emeritus Ken Zoll is frequently a man out of time, whether he’s doing environmental interpretation at the Crane Petroglyph Heritage Site or taking in the light from celestial bodies that traveled millions of years to reach his telescope.  

“My career was at the Railroad Retirement System, and for several years there I was the director of retirement benefits,” Zoll said. “So when these million-and-a-half checks would go out every month, my name would be on the check. So I’d get these letters from retirees, and a lot of times it was like, ‘You’re the only person I know, and thank you for sending me a check.’ I got a sense that, boy, there’s a lot of people that retire that are bored to tears, and it ain’t going to happen to me. So that’s part of the drive. But I’m just innately [a person who] needs to keep busy.”

Zoll and his wife Nancy recently celebrated their 54th anniversary in September after first meeting in a Chicago suburb in the late 1960s.

“I was at a friend’s house, and we were in the basement playing cards with three or four of us, and the guy’s sister had some friends over,” Ken recalled. “She was one of the girls that came down, and I said, ‘Oh, who’s that?’”

“We’re kind of like newlyweds. People always tell us that we just have a very close relationship,” Nancy Zoll said. “[Ken] didn’t seem like he was trying too hard. He was just being very sweet, and it just blossomed after that.”

“We’ve never raised our voice at each other,” Ken Zoll said.

“We’re blessed, that’s all I can say,” Nancy Zoll said.

Zoll’s interest in the field of archaeoastronomy developed soon after the couple retired to the Village of Oak Creek in 2004. Motivated by a desire to familiarize himself with the local trails, he initially joined the trail crew with the Friends of the Forest before colleagues there encouraged him to become a docent at the V Bar V Heritage Site, now known as the Crane Petroglyph Site, in January 2005. As visitors came with questions, Zoll found himself doing more research on pre-Columbian astronomy and how the site’s former inhabitants used the location and its petroglyphs to track celestial events. 

Despite his lack of a degree in archaeology, Zoll noted that many self-taught “avocational” researchers like himself can contribute significantly to the field by focusing deeply on specific topics. 

“Since my last job was chief information officer in the latest technology, I simply went from the high-tech of the 21st century to the high-tech of the 11th century,” Zoll said. “When they created these calendars with rock art or manipulating the environment, they were very much into engineering features, engineering the sky, and understanding how this works and the timing of it, and creating something to mark those events, so it’s a very physical thing.“

Zoll’s research on archaeoastronomy eventually led to the publication of two books, “Sinagua Sunwatchers: An Archaeoastronomy Survey of the V Bar V Heritage Site and the Sacred Mountain Basin,” and “Understanding the Rock Art of Sedona,” and to the presentation of numerous talks on the subject at the Crane site. 

He was recently invited by the Hopi’s Sun Clan to share his findings on their ancient solar calendars as part of an effort to recover lost or forgotten traditions. Zoll explained that the federal government’s policy of forcing American Indian youth into Westernized boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries interrupted the transmission of cultural knowledge across generations. 

“This clan is trying to regenerate that knowledge, and so they asked me, ‘What research did you use?’” Zoll said. “The material that I’m able to research and give them shows their ancestral history and the mechanics of how they created the calendars … I’ll probably be going up there two or three more times.”

Zoll said he is starting to reduce his archaeological pursuits and has been picking up painting and playing the trumpet again after selling his trumpet in college to pay for Nancy’s wedding ring. 

“As you get older, it’s time to move away and let another generation move in with new fresh ideas,” Zoll said. However, he added that he was “pretty sure” his last article would be about his investigation of approximately 10 meteorites that were previously cataloged as having been manually transported by American Indians to archaeological sties, often sites far from any known settlements.

“I started digging around and looking at maps and research, and none of them were anywhere near any dwellings, which made me think, ‘Well, OK, if they weren’t near dwellings, and they’re way out there, how did they get there?’” Zoll said.

Zoll’s research has led him to believe that these meteorites may have broken off from a larger meteor, possibly the one that created the nearby Meteor Crater as it was entering the atmosphere. The article is currently being peer-reviewed and doesn’t have a publication date.  

“[Nancy’s] been bugging me to start painting again,” Zoll said, “and it’s gotten to the point now where I’m writing music, which I hadn’t done forever, so that’s kind of a challenge. It’s almost like a crossword puzzle to move around the musical notes. So [I’m] just keeping active.”