The Sinagua: Farmers of the Red Rock Country
Near Sedona, Arizona
Long before orchards and wagons, this red rock country belonged to a farming people archaeologists call the Sinagua. The name is a bit of an accident. In nineteen thirty-nine the scholar Harold Colton borrowed it from an old Spanish phrase, Sierra Sin Agua, mountains without water, that once described the peaks near Flagstaff.
The people themselves left no written name, and their likely descendants, the Hopi, prefer the word Hisatsinom, the people of long ago. They lived across the Verde Valley from roughly six hundred fifty to fourteen hundred of the common era, farming corn, beans, squash, and even cotton, watering their fields with techniques they learned in part from the Hohokam to the south. Sedona sat at a crossroads.
The Sinagua traded seashells carried up from the Gulf of California, macaws and copper bells from deep in Mexico, and turquoise from the north, blending the customs of the desert and the plateau. Around fourteen hundred they left, in a slow departure that scholars still debate, blaming drought, exhausted soil, and the arrival of new peoples. They did not vanish.
Their blood and their stories continue among the Hopi and their neighbors today.
