Hohokam

While today's temperatures break records, it's always been hot and dry here.

And that is why, centuries ago, the very first inhabitants, the ancient Hohokam people, dug canals, moving water across the Phoenix Valley to irrigate their crops.

Today, Phoenix still has a canal system, although the word system isn't exactly right.

It's more like a haphazard mix of waterways, a few of which connect, others of which don't.

Besides the Nile, the most advanced civilizations in Black Africa tended to be in and around the Niger River and the Arid Sahel.

In the United States of America, one of the most advanced civilizations was in Arizona called the Hohokam with extensive canals and also in Colorado with the Chaco Canyon.

and the Hopi and the Navajo.

These are dry climates.

But the canal idea was to dig through.

The canals Hohokam used were for... like rain and the uphill-downhill thing from the Salt River when they got stuff.

I don't think we're draining too much of the salt as far as that.

We damned it up.

Wow.

The Hohokam people established villages along the Santa Cruz River, which back then ran year-round.

Mm-hmm.

Right? Established it 300 years before Jesus showed up.

Communities maintained language, ceremony, farming, fishing, food traditions, and identity.

What the archaeologic labels call Hohokam or Sanawa didn't simply turn into ghosts when the Europeans arrived.

Human histories continued.

And strangely, wonderfully, what civilizations seem to preserve particularly well is their food.