Finding and Understanding Ancient Hohokam Irrigated Agricultural Fields in the Middle Gila River Valley, South-Central Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For over a century, archaeologists have investigated the vast network of prehistoric Hohokam canal irrigation systems in the lower Salt and middle Gila River valleys in southern Arizona. However, documentation of the agricultural fields in which prehistoric farmers irrigated their crops generally was lacking until the last 20 years. This is largely a result of the difficulty in identifying ancient fields, since they are not visible on the surface and have been obscured or destroyed by natural landscape processes as well as historic and modern disturbances. The Gila River Indian Community’s Cultural Resource Management Program has devoted extensive efforts to documenting the ancient Hohokam canal systems in the Middle Gila River Valley. In this paper, I present an example where archaeological and pedological evidence provide a clear demarcation of the fields that were irrigated along the Snaketown Canal System. Moreover, these data indicate that the soils in the Snaketown fields represent an irragric anthrosol, a soil type that forms from the prolonged deposition of fine sediments from irrigation water. This pedostratigraphic unit was formed by a millennium of irrigation from AD 450 to 1450. This study greatly expanded our understanding of the agrarian landscape of the Snaketown Canal System.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33144