Ceramic Markers of Ancient Irrigation Communities

More than 1000 years ago, a people that archaeologists call the Hohokam first inhabited the deserts of what is now Arizona. They flourished for more than 70 generations in the lower Salt River Valley, the place where Phoenix now stands. Buried beneath the modern metropolis are the ruins of many aboriginal villages and a vast and elaborate irrigation network that may have watered 40,000 acres of cropland. (Jerry Howard completed this map, Figure 1, of the Hohokam irrigation canals and major sites; he expanded on earlier research by Linda Nicholas and Omar Turney.) Despite their grand achievements, the Hohokam disappeared long before European explorers first gazed upon the abandoned settlements.