l8o SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



Arizona's prehistoric canals were not individual enterprises. Entire 

 communities joined hands to achieve that on which their very ex- 

 istence depended. By preference, these folk were farmers in a desert 

 environment. They waged a constant struggle against seemingly in- 

 superable odds ; asked no favors ; required no cornucopia for content- 

 ment. But without successful harvests their immediate future loomed 

 darkly ; without water, food crops could not mature : without canals, 

 water could not he conveyed to fields suitable for cultivation. Canals 

 meant water and water meant life. Hence those man-made ditches 

 that reached into the river channels with flimsy brush and stone dams 

 and meandered down valley long miles to isolated villages whose dun 

 adol)e dwellings clustered about a massive edifice of thick, earthen 

 walls. 



In 1926 Dr. Byron Cummings, Director of the Arizona State Mu- 

 seum, surveyed 40-odd miles of ancient canals in the Gua River Valley ; 

 in 1922, Dr. O. A. Turney, of Phoenix, published ' his map of the still 

 larger canal systems bordering the Salt River. These timely surveys 

 must find jjlace among our permanent records. They cannot be re- 

 ]ieated and it is already too late to check them for possilile error. The 

 old canals are mostly gone now, a sacrifice to agriculture and to urban 

 development. Modern homes and office buildings ; cotton fields, vine- 

 yards and acres of lettuce have recently spread over garden plots 

 where i;)rimitive folk cultivated maize, l)eans and squashes. 



Monster dams, named in honor of two ex-presidents, have been 

 raised to impound fiood waters which are thereafter equitably dis- 

 tributed, even during the hot dry months, to ever thirsty fields. Newly 

 dug ditches often follow their untimed predecessors in wide curves 

 across the gentle, cacti-covered slopes of the valley. The recent, re- 

 markable increase in ]iopulation of Rhoenix and its neighboring com- 

 munities is l)asically owing to a fairly constant water supply con- 

 veyed by this far-fiung network of modern canals and the consequent, 

 successful cultivation of desert soil. 



But this expansion, this evidence of industry has brought with 

 it almost complete obliteration of the prehistoric irrigation systems. 

 These latter made possible the first real civilization in Salt River 

 Valley — a native Indian civilization leased on agriculture in which the 

 entire community directly participated. Of the 230 miles of ancient 



^The Arizona Repul)lican, Phoenix, NovemI)er 22, IQ22: reproduced in "The 

 Land of the Stone Hue" (Tnrney). 1924, and in the Arizona Historical Review, 

 Vol. 2, No. 2, 1929. The map supposedly includes the earlier surveys by C. A. 

 Garlick, of the Hemenway Expedition, and tliat of H. R. Patrick, published in 

 Bull. T, Phoenix Free Museum, 1903. 



