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By Root 1598 0

somewhat smaller) were, for the most part, members of the Hohokam culture, a civilization that thrived uninterrupted near the confluence of the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers for at least a thousand years, until about 1400, when it disappeared. The confluence of Arizona’s only three rivers occurs in the hottest desert in North America, a huge bowl of sun now occupied by modern Phoenix and environs. Average summer temperature is 94 degrees; average annual rainfall is just over seven inches. There are far more hospitable places in the state, such as the cool Ponderosa-clad Mogollon Rim, but archaeologists surmise that the inhabitants of Arizona’s higher and wetter regions drifted down to join the Hohokam in the latter days of their realm; something about the desert proved irresistibly attractive. The lure was probably food, which the Hohokam rarely lacked. They were the first purely agricultural culture in the Southwest, if not all of North America. Midden remains, well preserved by the desert’s dryness and heat, suggest that the Hohokam rarely hunted, or even ate meat; their copious starch and vegetable diet was supplemented only occasionally by a bighorn sheep, antelope, raven, or kangaroo rat. Sometimes they ate sturgeon. That sturgeon bones have been found amid the Hohokam ruins suggests a Gila River considerably fuller and more constant than the ghost river whites have known—a river that, even before its headwaters were dammed, usually ran underground. And this, in turn, suggests a possible reason for the Hohokam’s demise: that the climate was considerably wetter during the centuries their civilization flourished, then turned suddenly dry.

Whatever happened, the Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya farther south. They were good builders, using rafters for houses and I-beams to create ancestral skyscrapers four stories high. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea.

When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves. The largest of the canals they dug was fifteen miles long and eleven yards wide from bank to bank; like the other main canals, it had a perfectly calibrated drop of 2.5 meters per mile, enough to sustain a flow rate that would flush out most of the unwanted silt. There were dozens of miles of laterals and ditches, implying irrigation of many thousands of acres of land. Because of the dry climate and the provenance of the irrigated land, the Hohokam should have enjoyed good health; they made superior weapons; they were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? It is hard to imagine a civilization covering thousands of square miles and comprising hundreds of thousands of people just vanishing, but according to Emil Haury, an archaeologist who became fascinated by their demise, they apparently did. “We are almost totally ignorant of Hohokam archaeology... after 1400,” writes Haury in Snaketown, an archaeological record of the impressive Hohokam artifacts he and his colleagues unearthed. The relatively few Pima Indians whom whites found living in central Arizona in the 1800s were presumably descended from the Hohokam—which in Pima language, means “those who have gone”—but they offered no explanation as to what happened to them. Drought remains a possibility—perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen—but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little