Today, Pueblo Grande lies at the heart of a sprawling 15,000-square-mile megalopolis with some 4.9 million residents, which for the better part of half a century has been among the fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the United States. In 1950, the Arizona capital was little more than a large town, home to roughly 100,000 residents scattered across 17 square miles. THE QUIET POIGNANCY of Pueblo Grande is a striking contrast to the gleam and frenetic hum of modern Phoenix. The 336-mile-long Central Arizona Canal delivers a third of Arizona’s water from the Colorado River to the state’s cities and farms. Hohokam derives from a word in the language of the Akimel O’odham, a contemporary Native nation. The secret of the culture’s disappearance from the region may be encapsulated in its name. “In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water,” Marc Reisner wrote in his masterwork Cadillac Desert. “They either had too little or used too much.” Two hypotheses (perhaps not mutually exclusive) are that the Hohokam were laid low by prolonged drought and that hundreds of years of relentless irrigation salinized the soil, which in turn led to a collapse in agriculture. No one knows exactly why, in the 14th century, the Hohokam abandoned Pueblo Grande and other settlements across the Salt River Valley. In some cases, they grafted their ditch over the outline of an ancient canal-a modern civilization building upon the foundations of a past one. This concrete-lined channel, known as the Old Crosscut, is one of hundreds of canals built by white farmers who settled the region in the late 1800s and who also grew melons and squash in the desert. Along one side of the site runs a small trickle of water, slick with languid green strands of algae. Today, all that remain of the Hohokam big house are a smattering of mounds, earthen walls, and the outlines of small rooms that served as living quarters, granaries, and perhaps ceremonial centers. Nineteenth- and early-20th-century white settlers marveled at the perfect design of the canals, which, in the words of one observer, were “an engineering triumph.” No other ancient civilization in the Americas-not even the Inca or the Maya-built a more extensive water conveyance system.
The canals diverted water from the Salt River to irrigate the Hohokam’s fields of maize, melons, squash, and beans. The key to the Hohokam’s success in the blistering climate of the Sonoran Desert was a complex network of canals that, at its zenith, was some 500 miles in length, crisscrossing what is now affectionately referred to as the Valley of the Sun. While the Roman Empire was falling into decay, the Hohokam culture was building one of the greatest cities in what would eventually be called the Americas. Home to hundreds of families at any one time, Pueblo Grande was but a single outpost in a sprawling, thriving civilization of as many as 300,000 people at its height. Pueblo Grande, the “big house,” was settled around AD 450 and for close to 1,000 years was continuously inhabited by the Hohokam people. Not far from the constant roar of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport and just a few miles from the massive, air-conditioned stadium of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team lies what might be the quietest enclave in the United States’ fastest-growing city.
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