The main canals were built with just enough of a grade to flush out silt and keep it from accumulating. Adobe mud-lined porous areas, and deep pools retained fresh water when the flow in the canals dropped. Poles set along the canals supported water-control structures, possibly curtainlike fabric sheets. Lateral ditches (not all were in use at the same time) spread water across a patchwork of fields. Canals were dug with stone and wooden tools for a total of several hundred miles. Hohokam irrigation technology was impressively complex. Irrigation canals from rivers to the fields downstream were the answer. In the warmth of their arid environment the Hohokam could produce two crops a year-as long as they had enough water. The Hohokam were an agricultural people who supplemented their primary crop of maize with hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits and nuts. Some date their advent as early as 300 B.C. As with most matters relating to the Hohokam (such as their peak population, for which estimates range from 50,000 to 400,000), there is considerable scholarly debate over when the Hohokam first appeared in Arizona. 300 others believe they descended from earlier native peoples. Some seientists believe that they were migrants from Mesoamerica who moved north from what is now Mexico sometime around A.D. Since then archeologists have debated the origins of the Hohokam, who appeared suddenly in the Southwest with no known antecedents. Today’s Pima Indians gave the Hohokam their name it has been translated as “all used up,” “the ancient ones,” “people who have gone,” and similar phrases.Įxcavations at Snaketown, Arizona, in 1934 yielded the first detailed knowledge of Hohokam culture. 300 to 1400, the Hohokam inhabited the arid region that is now southcentral Arizona, around the modern-day site of Phoenix. Long before the Spanish settlers, and long before the Pueblo Indians, a vanished, people built extensive irrigation canals in a corner of the Southwest.
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