A mile outside the alley of Fire State Park, Hwy-169 meets Hwy-167, Northshore drive, which circles back south toward Las Vegas. Staying on Hwy-169 as it heads north from this intersection is a much less attractive option - maps that suggest this is a scenic route are pretty wide of the mark - but it brings you in nine miles to overton's intriguing Lost City Museum.

Between around 300 BC and 1150 AD, a people known as the Ancestral Puebloans are thought to have farmed in the Moapa alley, immediately north of the alley of Fire. This was the western extremity of their domain, which extended across the entire Colorado Plateau, from modern Utah and Arizona into New Mexico and Colorado. The first to build the characteristic adobe villages that the Spaniards later called "pueblos," they were the ancestors of today's Pueblo Indians - hence their modern name, now used by archeologists in preference to the former term of "Anasazi."

The "Lost City," by far the largest Ancestral Puebloan settlement in Nevada, was really more of an elongated village. Stretching for around thirty miles along the Moapa alley, and originally known to archeologists as the Pueblo Grande de Nevada, its ruins were partly submerged by the creation of Lake Mead.

At that time, in the 1930s, the finest artifacts from the site were gathered into this museum, which was given a catchy name in the hope of making it easier to raise funds.

Displays at the museum are still very much rooted in the 1930s - techniques like painting over a slab of genuine petroglyphs would appall modern archeologists - but there's still plenty to fascinate casual visitors. The whole structure is designed in a mock-Pueblo style, with a replica of a dig on a genuine site inside, and reconstructions of Pueblo buildings, also on their original sites, in the garden outside

daily 8.30am-4.30pm; phone 397-2193; $5

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