Human beings have lived in Greater Phoenix (it’s also called
the Valley of the Sun) for a
fantastically long time: at least twelve thousand years.
[Butte and I could be obnoxious, and mention that bears have lived in North America for nearly
five million years, but … oh … well … I guess we have mentioned that now.]
Anyway, archaeologists
(scientists who study the human past)
call the Valley of the Sun’s first
human inhabitants Paleo-Indians.
The
Paleo-Indians were skilled hunters who lived off game like mammoths, camels, and
horses.
When these big-game animals died
out in North America, around 9,000 years
ago, hunting and gathering people known
as the Archaic Indians prospered in Arizona’s
beautiful Sonoran Desert.
They hunted smaller animals, fished, and gathered wild plants,
roots, fruit, and seeds.
There are more than 200
species of edible plants in the Sonoran Desert. That’s probably more than at my grocery store! The Archaic people processed plants to eat using tools like
this:
The stone bowl is called a metate, and the hand-held grinder is called a mano. You can still see manos
and metates used today. This young woman, for example, is using a mano and
metate to prepare a delicious chip-dip for us called guacamole:
Around three thousand years ago, the Valley of the Sun’s people
began farming. They grew corn, beans, gourds, squash, cotton, and
many other crops.
Corn (or maize),
beans, and squash were all domesticated in the Americas. They were traditionally
grown together, and are called “the three sisters.”
Farms need water. To channel a steady supply of water to their crops, the ancient farmers dug ditches from the Salt River. Over the centuries, the ditches became a huge system of irrigation canals.
People dug these ditches and canals by hand, without backhoes, dump trucks, or bulldozers! Boy, don’t complain when someone asks you to just mow the lawn ...
Here, Butte is demonstrating one way people might carry
heavy loads (like the earth from a new canal) in those days:
You would sling the strap of the carrying-basket across your
forehead. The metal decorations made a nice sound while you walked.
The Hohokam
people farmed in the Valley of the Sun until about A.D. 1500. Around Phoenix
and the Salt River, these hard-working farmers dug 14 irrigation networks (with nearly
500 kilometres of canals) that irrigated over 100,000 hectares of land. A bit
further south, in the Gila River valley,
some 7,700 hectares of fertile fields were irrigated by four hand-dug networks
of canals.
The Pueblo Grande Museum preserves part of a Hohokam community
that was first settled around A.D. 100.
At the site's heart is a huge platform mound the size of a
football field. The mound is two storeys of solid mud, and probably had
administrative or ceremonial buildings on top.
The village around the platform was once 2.5 square
kilometres in size. The museum has a couple of re-constructed adobe houses to
show how people lived. The houses look pretty comfortable.
This is a ballcourt,
where the Hohokam played ceremonial games
using balls made with rubber from a plant native to the area:
There were thirty towns around here at the height of Hohokam
culture (around A.D. 1400), and 100 ballcourts. Ten canals came off the river near
Pueblo Grande, some stretching as far as fifty kilometres. You could learn more about
the irrigation canals by taking a tour of the Pueblo Grande’s Park of Four Waters, which preserves
sections of the ancient waterworks.
The Hohokam may have abandoned their farms and canals
because of alternating droughts and massive floods five hundred years ago.
The Pima people, who live in the Valley of
the Sun today, believe that they are direct descendants of the ancient Hohokam.
Another modern people who now live here, the Maricopa, migrated to the Gila River valley in the 16th
century.
You can learn even more about the Valley of the Sun’s ancient
peoples at the Desert Botanical Garden.
Strolling along its Plants
& People of the Sonoran Desert Loop Trail, you can see fields of corn,
beans, and squash; important wild plants like the saguaro and yucca; and re-created shelters. You can even try
grinding corn in the traditional way.
The ancient people of the Valley of the Sun also left behind
amazing rock art, or petroglyphs. What
do you think these petroglyphs
depict?
The Deer Valley Rock Art Center, owned by
Arizona State University
in north Phoenix, has petroglyphs in the
thousands. And at the Heard Museum,
you can see both ancient and modern Native American art and artifacts.
Story © S. Clouthier
Photos © S. Clouthier and D. Wei
Map courtesy http://www.gemland.com/hohokam.htm
Columbian mammoth image courtesy sergiodlarosa/Wikipedia
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