Modern, historic canals follow those of a vanished people
Submitted by coldrum on Wednesday, 20 June 2007 Page Views: 969
Pre-ContactPhoenix, at 4 million residents, is growing faster than any other population center in the nation. But if you lift the rug of Phoenix, buried directly below you will find the remains of an ancient city, a Neolithic version of Phoenix.The first communities appeared in the low basin of the Salt River 3,000 years ago, as shown by remains recently discovered under the new Phoenix Convention Center. From there, prehistoric settlements took an escalating course of empire, filling the basin to overflowing. They sprawled all the way south to present-day Tucson, while satellite communities appeared even north of what today is Flagstaff. They grew until they were no longer able to sustain themselves.
Then, their civilization fell.
The culture was known as Hohokam, a Pima word meaning "all used up." The doubled first syllable accentuates the sentiment, telling of a people who completely burned themselves out. When Anglo settlers arrived shortly after the Civil War, they found a desert studded with grand adobe ruins, vestiges of an inexplicable culture. They called their new settlement "Phoenix," imagining themselves rising from the ashes of a lost city.
The original Anglo settlers began digging canals in the mid-1800s, and wherever they dug, they unearthed the remains of Hohokam canals below. For the next 150 years, engineers planned new canals throughout this growing city, and nearly each one follows an original Hohokam grid, as if pouring water back into an ancient hydraulic empire, bringing a ghost to life. New and old waterways follow the same gradients, the same courses.
The Hohokams built nearly a thousand miles of canals and laterals, quenching fields of cotton, corn, pumpkins, amaranth and beans. They filled basins for domestic water at innumerable villages and town sites. Modern Phoenix followed suit, becoming a cotton-growing mecca, a city of water in the heart of the desert. Communities sprang up in the same places that Hohokam settlements once stood. Even the saline content of modern Phoenix's water matches the chemical signature of Hohokam water just before the fall. The two cities lie along a similar environmental trajectory, and they may face a similar end.
For more of this fasinating article comparing modern Pheonix to the Hohokam civilizatiion, including a sobering assessment from archaeologist Leonard Banks, see this Arizonal Republic article.
More about the ancient canals on our Site Page.
Note: "The bigger they are, the harder they fall," - Modern Pheonix will go the way of the Hohokam?
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