ARIZONA'S PREHISTORIC CANALS, FROM THE AIR 1 



By NEIL M. JUDD, 

 Curator, Division of Archeology, U. S. National Museum 



Out in central Arizona, where cotton fields, citrus groves and date 

 palms reach out across endless miles to caress jagged igneous and 

 sandstone buttes, prehistoric peoples once erected a noteworthy civili- 

 zation upon an agricultural foundation. That ancient civilization is 

 gone now — lost with the desert acres on which it flourished — and 

 few traces remain of the gigantic canals that made its primitive agri- 

 culture possible. 



But those few traces merit careful preservation. They are all we 

 have left to remind us of that unnamed, aboriginal folk whose engi- 

 neering achievements rightfully arrest the attention of our mechanical 

 age. For those prehistoric canals — it has been estimated that half a 

 century ago there were no less than 300 miles of them in the Salt 

 River valley alone — were so accurately and efficiently constructed that 

 portions of them, taken over by white settlers of 1870 and thereabouts, 

 are actually in use at the present time. And here is another point we 

 are apt to overlook : Every mile of those ancient channels was lit- 

 erally dug by hand, since the Arizona Indians knew nothing either 

 of beasts of burden or metal tools until well on in the seventeenth 

 century. 



Following the old canal banks, one occasionally happens upon the 

 fragment of a stone " hoe " — a thin blade of igneous rock, chipped on 

 one side to a cutting edge. With such rude tools, with fractured cob- 

 blestones and sharpened sticks, the canal builders hacked and prodded 

 at the hard desert soil. In baskets and blankets, we may safely con- 

 jecture, women and children carried the loosened earth out from the 

 excavation. Thus, mile after weary mile, an entire community labored 

 to construct the canals that watered their communal fields. 



Nowhere else in the New World has evidence been found of pre- 

 historic irrigation systems comparable to those of central Arizona. 

 They may even have surpassed, both in size and in the number of 

 acres served, those famous systems of the Tigris and Euphrates val- 

 leys — irrigation works that watered the seed of native ability and 



1 In December, 1930, Mr. Odd S. Halseth, of Phoenix, was continuing cer- 

 tain studies connected with this aerial survey, in behalf of the Bureau of Ameri- 

 can Ethnology. 



157 



