THE ANCIENT PEOPLES. 39 
basket of shelled corn, and a bag of corn meal. Beans 
are also found and squash and gourds are known to 
have been raised. 
We know little of their methods of tilling the land. 
Their tools were simple wooden spatulas or small spades 
of horn with wooden handles, with which the ground 
was dug before and after the seed was planted. In much 
of the territory occupied near the sources of the streams, 
the valley lands were kept moist by the underflow and 
did not require irrigation. At the elevation at which 
these streams leave the mountains there is considerable 
rain in late summer, enough to mature corn even on 
the upland mesas. Near many of these mesa pueblos 
reservoirs are found which received the water from the. 
mountain gulches and retained it for household purposes. 
In some cases the water thus impounded was used to 
irrigate the land. Near Solomonville on the upper 
portion of the Gila River the gardens were arranged 
in terraces on the sides and at the bases of mesas, and 
were watered from reservoirs which retained the rain 
falling above. 
Irrigation. The people who occupied the valley of 
the Rio Verde in central Arizona made fairly extensive 
use of irrigation ditches in the watering of their crops. 
But it is along the middle and lower courses of the 
Salt and Gila Rivers that evidences are found of irri- 
gation practised on a large scale. The Hemenway 
Archaeological Expedition, in 1887-1888, explored Los 
Muertos, a veritable city with thirty-six large com- 
munal structures, nine miles southeast of Tempe, 
Arizona. This city, nine miles from the Salt River, 
was supplied with water by a large canal 7 ft. deep, 
4 ft. wide at the bottom, and 30 ft. wide at the top. 
The walls and the bottom of the canal were very hard, 
as if they had been plastered with adobe clay after the 
