Archaeology at the Head of Canal System 2, Phoenix, Arizona

Summary

Recently, Desert Archaeology, Inc. has had opportunity to conduct several archaeological projects for the City of Phoenix west and northwest of the Park of Four Waters, near where the main trunk canals that fed prehistoric Canal System 2 originate and diverge from the Salt River. Seven of these trunk canals have been encountered, along with numerous distribution and lateral canals, water control and catchment structures, seasonal and semi-permanent habitations, and the first irrigated Hohokam fields to be exposed in plan. Establishing the ages of these features, especially the canals, has been a primary focus of research. The numbers, types, and ages of the features documented by these projects illustrate that people were using the canals and locale terrain in a variety of ways across time. Highlights from these projects, summarized in this paper, reveal the Hohokam’s intimate knowledge of their landscape and how to manipulate it to best advantage. Conditions that might eventually have contributed to their collapse are also discussed. The findings highlight why study of the irrigated spaces between prehistoric settlements is crucial to fully understanding how the Hohokam managed to thrive for so many centuries in their desert environment.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Society and Economy in the Hohokam World: New Evidence and Insights from Canal System 2, Phoenix, Arizona

Keywords

Spatial Coverage