The Hohokam and Their Canals

Before Phoenix, before Tucson, before the Spanish, there was water. And wherever there was water in the desert, there were engineers.

The people archaeologists call the Hohokam occupied the Salt and Gila River valleys for roughly fourteen hundred years, from around one hundred CE to about fourteen fifty CE. At their peak they built one of the most sophisticated irrigation networks in the pre-Columbian Americas. More than five hundred miles of canals cut through the Sonoran Desert floor, some of them thirty feet wide and ten feet deep, carrying water from the Salt River to fields of corn, beans, squash, and cotton. The system fed a population that may have reached forty thousand people at its height.

They built platform mounds used for ceremonies and governance. At the site now called Snaketown, on the Gila River, the Hohokam lived and traded for over a thousand years. Shell ornaments found there trace routes all the way to the Gulf of California, nearly two hundred miles south.

Sometime in the mid-fourteen hundreds, the Hohokam dispersed. Drought, soil salinity buildup from centuries of irrigation, social stress, the causes are debated. The O'odham people who live in southern Arizona today hold oral traditions linking their ancestors to the Hohokam and to those same canal routes.

When Anglo settlers arrived in the Salt River Valley in the eighteen sixties, they did not dig new canals from scratch. They dug out the old Hohokam ones. Phoenix's earliest farmers followed channels already a thousand years old, cut by hands the settlers never knew.

That act of following someone else's water is, in a way, the whole story of Arizona.