Making Sense of the Hohokam Irrigation Anomaly

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On a sparse prehistoric landscape where little precipitation fell, Hohokam farmers dug vast canal networks across tens of thousands of acres of xeric desert soils on the banks of the Salt River. Their large-scale hydraulics, without managerial centralization, mark the Hohokam infrastructure as a theoretical anomaly. Cross-culturally, as irrigation scales increase, so must complexity of the political apparatus to manage the expanding hydraulic works. But, not so for the Hohokam. To understand the mismatch between Hohokam scale and complexity, we start with the water.

Employing a tree-ring-based reconstruction of Salt River streamflows, we estimated the water supply in each part of the valley each year. Also, we approximated water demand utilizing aerial photographs to measure the acreage served by the canals. Our calculations showed there was an abundance of moisture to meet the needs across the valley and throughout its history.

Without the social strife that can boil over under the harsh conditions of chronic water scarcity, the Hohokam irrigation economy avoided the heavy-handed controls that typify other large-scale agriculturalists. For the Hohokam, it was large-scale without complexity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40469.0