Monta Loma Traditional Geocache
Nomex: The cache owner is not responding to issues with this geocache, so I must regretfully archive it.
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Difficulty:
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Size: 
(small)
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In Monta Loma Park, flat multiuse public area adjacent to elementary school. Not located on school grounds (fenced).
Cache is a camo-taped 2" diameter plastic jar, containing small toys and a log and pen. Large enough for small TBs. Lots of muggles while school is in session adjacent, so use stealth during weekdays. Synonymous school was once attended by Steve Jobs, when he lived in the neighborhood.
Please make sure cache is not visible upon replacing, as it has been muggled and replaced four times.
Monta Loma Park is in the center of Monta Loma neighborhood in Mountain View, whose name probably derives from slightly garbled Spanish "montón loma", meaning "mound hill."
This area has been in continuous habitation since classical times, formerly the location of an Ohlone settlement with an adjacent refuse/dung/burial mound. The latter site, "Castro Mound," was located on the then-Mariano Castro rancho in the nineteenth century. It was designated as a heritage resource site in the 1940s as CA-SCL-1, and was deemed one of the most important archaeological sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Teams from Stanford University and UC Berkeley excavated and studied the area several times between 1893 and the early 1950s, and found prehistorical refuse as well as numerous human remains, reflecting a record of human occupation going back to the range 200 BCE - 100 AD.
However, the late nineteeth and early-mid twentieth centuries also exhibited a rather careless approach to Native American sites... any remaining village structures on the Castro rancho disappeared as the land was reused and then subdivided. The 300'x400', 6-foot-high mound itself, given its composted human and food waste content, was partially dug up and mined as ferilizer for local orchards, scattering artifacts widely. The actual mound site is about 900' southwest of the cache (thought to be around Nita x Betlo Ave.), underneath the homes built when the site was bulldozed and flattened in 1952-54. A nearby defunct shopping mall was built in the mid-1960s and now houses Google's X-projects facility.
As you look at today's sports fields and suburban homes, keep in mind the 2000-year-old Native American presence that preceded it... as well as how cavalier our society once was with its cultural artifacts.
[Note: original 2006 cache was muggled in October 2010, replaced with new similar caches and logs in January 2011, May 2013, July 2013, March 2014, and May 2017.]
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
qbja oruvaq ehyrf naq erthyngvbaf