Our Town Hohokamville
The Hohokam’s climate strategies served them well for some 1100-1200 years. Until they didn’t.
In the year 1350, in the Salt River watershed near present-day Phoenix, a young Hohokam woman named Taya woke to the sound of chirping birds. The sun peeked over the distant blue hills and entered the open door to her stone and adobe home, casting a warm orange glow over the earthen floor that reflected onto the walls. She was sixteen, and her heart fluttered like the wings of a morpho every time she thought of Kimo, the boy from the neighboring clan.
Taya's day began with her usual routine. She slipped out of her tiny home, its walls thick and cool against the morning heat, and stepped onto the garden terrace where the sweet smell of sage, mesquite, and squash blossoms filled the air. She looked off into the valley, its green floodplain shimmering in sunflowers, maize, agave, squash and peach trees. Just outside her door, the earth was rich and dark under its cover of marsh elder, knotweed, may grass, little barley, amaranth, Jerusalem artichoke, and bottle gourds. Across the hillside and leading down to the valley, she could see and hear the water flowing from mountain springs through the intricate irrigation canals built by her ancestors. Marvels of stonework, they traced the path of primordial debris flows and so had withstood the recent years of alternating drought and deluge. At the center of her village, one of the channels carried water to renew the basins where she would wash her laundry and refresh the ponds where the fishkeepers raised o’omuni, the humpback sucker with its yellow belly.
When she followed the trail downhill to pick ripe squash and pluck ears of 60-day corn, Taya heard more of the gossip swirling through the village like dust in the wind. The talk of drought had taken root in their conversations. They spoke of last year’s floods washing away precious soil and making more work. Floods were not the problem now. The villagers feared that there would be a lean winter if the rains didn’t come soon.
Returning up the racetrack path, its floor lined with polished stones for the annual barefoot challenge, Taya carried back the woven basket of food for her family. She ground maize into a coarse flour using a stone mano and metate, mixing it with herbs from her terrace and wild greens she had foraged along her route. She boiled it into a thick porridge sweetened with honey that she stored in a gourd on her shelf. As she stirred the pot over an open flame, her thoughts drifted back to Kimo. They had shared laughter and dreams under the stars and he promised to take her to the ceremonial center later that day.
The sun climbed higher in the sky as Taya finished cooking. The heat was becoming oppressive, and she could feel the weight of worry in her chest—would there be enough rain this year? Would Kimo still want to be with her if their crops failed?
Later that afternoon, Taya and Kimo walked hand-in-hand to the ceremonial center. It was a place of beauty and reverence, adorned with colorful flowers and offerings left by villagers praying for gentle rains and bountiful harvests. Taya felt a sense of peace wash over her as they approached the central altar. She knelt down beside it, placing a handful of wildflowers—a vibrant mix of cactus flower, desert marigold, purple sage and evening primrose—before the beaded conch shell that was the spirit home of their ancestors.
“Great spirits,” she whispered, “grant us rain and good harvests.” She closed her eyes tightly, adding a personal prayer: “And let Kimo love me as fiercely as I love him.”
Kimo stood beside her, his presence comforting. He too prayed silently, his gaze fixed on the horizon where dark clouds gathered ominously—a sign that perhaps their pleas were heard.
As they left the ceremonial center, Taya noticed how the once-clear skies were now streaked with gray; storms threatened to unleash their fury at any moment. The villagers were on edge; they knew how quickly a gentle rain could turn into a catastrophic flood.
The couple returned home under an increasingly darkened sky. Taya’s heart raced—not just from love but from fear of what was to come. Would they face another disaster? Would the canals hold?
As they walked through their village, Taya noticed others preparing for potential flooding—reinforcing channel banks and gathering supplies. The resilience of her people shone through adversity. They were used to facing nature’s challenges head-on.
That night, as thunder rumbled in the distance and lightning illuminated the desert landscape, Taya lay awake in bed thinking about Kimo and their future together amidst such uncertainty. She understood that life was fragile—like water slipping through fingers—but it was also beautiful in its unpredictability.
A walk in the desert
On a drive across the Sonoran desert somewhere between Los Angeles and Tucson, I stopped to examine what those long rock piles beside the highway were about. Viewing them with the eyes of a permaculture designer, they seemed to me to be engineered dikes. I was not far wrong, but the story behind the entire landscape was more interesting than that.
Hohokam is the name the early archaeologists to the area were told by local Pima Indians. Later, scholars learned that what they had heard was “Huhugam O’odham," which is Piman for "the people who have vanished," or "exhausted people." As ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan recalls from Pima legend, these people were on this earth before the Pima emerged. They began to disappear into a hole in the ground when Coyote said something to them that kept them from vanishing altogether. Today, they exist only in the DNA of their descendants.
The Hohokam arrived to the Gila-Salt bioregion, either from the underworld or from across the river, around 300 BCE. Master engineers, they diverted springs, marshes and mountain runoff to feed crops and protect their homes. They were not warlike and the configurations of their villages were not designed for protection from other humans, although they were well designed to protect against the viral spread of contagious diseases and sepsis. Because they gardened a desolate region for sufficiency, not surplus, and kept their possessions few and practical, the Hohokam had little to attract the attention of more militant neighbors.
As I walked the arroyos, the raised berms and stone piles I saw were all that remained of ancient Hohokam earthworks used from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. Their greatest extent was called the Classic Era, around 1100 CE. Nearly two thousand miles of Hohokam canals run through what is today’s metropolitan Phoenix, but now buried under “offices, feedlots, slaughterhouses, subdivisions, and shopping centers.” (Nabhan 1988) The best-preserved and most spectacular of the cerros de trincheras (“trench hills”) is located just south of the town of Trincheras in northern Sonora, México, about 70 miles south of the border. In a 1988 post-doc study, Nabhan wrote:
A thousand years ago, the Hohokam had the most diverse crop complex of any culture living in what is now the United States. But this cultural flowering, and the moisture that allowed its growth, was of short duration. Around A.D. 1150, a drought may have starved the fields fed by river-diversion canals, and there are increasing signs of the build-up of salinity in Hohokam fields. By this time, some of the canals had been consolidated into more extensive irrigation systems. Because so vast a canal network had been built over an eighteen-mile stretch of the Salt River, farmers could easily deplete the river of its entire water supply during months of low flow. A breakup and period of social disequilibrium among the Salt River Hohokam between A.D. 1050 and 1200 may have been aggravated by this water crisis. About that time, Snake-town was abandoned; pottery and other cultural remains dating from the Late Sedentary are altogether lacking from that large settlement on the Gila.
That was not the end of the road for the Hohokam, or Taya would not have had her dream of making a life with Kimo, two hundred years later. Bear that in mind when you look to this story for lessons about the polycrisis today. The Hohokam were problem solvers.
Walking the desert with my 12-year-old son, I could see the outlines of a village much like the one Taya would have lived in. Scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries did not understand the mysterious rock walls and put them down to defensive revetments, as if the Hohokam had need, or weapons, for trench warfare. Instead, they were small to medium-sized water catchments on contour, some of which drained into larger catchments while others were associated with houses, and what might in some climates be ponds behind dams were terraces behind retaining walls, sealed with clay, backfilled with gravel and pottery shards, then covered with topsoil and compost, infused with biochar. In the hot summer sun, open ponds would have evaporated. Instead, the gravel, ceramic fill and biochar retained the water when it rained and slowly released it to the roots of garden plants.
Homes were recessed into the hillside, but to prevent molds and stale air, there were, adjoining some, upgrade retaining walls and space for air to circulate around the structure. Houses were modest, cooled by the night air and their rock thermal mass.
Blowing in the wind
These simple accommodations served the Hohokam well for some 1100-1200 years—more than 5 times the age of the United States—and might have served them much longer had they not encountered a force of nature even their master engineers were powerless against.
As Nabhan relates:
“From 1300 to 1350, a period of decreasing streamflow occurred that was nothing like what the sedentary Hohokam had experienced before," Graybill explained to me. The watershed dried out and perhaps lost a considerable density of its plant cover. "Then," Don went on to say, "there were several extremely wet years: 1354, 1356, and 1358. A high spike in stream flow. A wet period after a long, dry one. The conditions through the mid-1350s were the kind that could have resulted in very major damage to canal intakes down in the valley.”
If the land was barren and brittle enough from the long drought, such wet years could have carried monstrous floods off the uplands in the watershed above the Hohokam farming villages. These floods may have cut the river channel below the level of the canal intakes or washed them away altogether. By the time another devastating flood occurred in 1382, much of the irrigation system on the Salt had likely been abandoned and human populations had begun to relocate themselves.
Cities like Tucson and Phoenix might do well to look up to the sky the way Taya and Kimo did. Changes are coming and they are ill-prepared to even grasp the magnitude. Nabhan concluded his article:
What we will never know is how the last Hohokam farmers felt when they abandoned their fields along the canals built by their forefathers.
Actually, I think we can know that. They were not happy about it.
While we lack the practical experience of the Hohokam engineers, I’d like to think we have learned a thing or two since their time. To arrest the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration built a great green wall from Texas to Canada using horse-drawn graders—and it worked! More recently, Natalie Fleming, a regenerative agriculture strategist in Idaho, has proposed to protect Phoenix by planting mangroves along the Baja and Sea of Cortes coastline to move more rain inland and water the Sonoran desert. Then:
Agroforestry and alley cropping to boost yields and create biodiversity.
Cover crops and water retention landscapes to hold every drop and restore life to the soil.
Bale grazing to enhance soil fertility and improve vegetation.
Every form of regenerative agriculture working in tandem to heal the land.
“We can grow crops, restore ecosystems while cooling the climate, mitigate tornadoes from feeding on hot air, and give life back to the barren lands that have suffered for too long,” she says. “Cooler temperatures, restored ecosystems, more sustainable agriculture, and healthier communities. 10 years. That’s all it takes to make the Southwest bloom again.”
References
Downum, Christian E. Between Desert and River: Hohokam Settlement and Land Use in the Los Robles Community. University of Arizona Press, 1993.
Fleming, N. Post to LinkedIn, December 2024.
Nabhan, Gary Paul. "Invisible Erosion: The Rise and Fall of Native Farming." Journal of the Southwest (1988): 552-572.
Nabhan, Gary Paul, ed. Ethnobiology for the future: linking cultural and ecological diversity. University of Arizona Press, 2016.
Nabhan, Gary Paul. Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land. Chelsea Green Publishing 2013
Disclaimer
The first portion of this essay, significantly rewritten, was initially inspired by Perplexity from this prompt: Write a short story about a 16-year-old Hohokam woman living in the 14th Century in the Salt River watershed near present-day Phoenix. Woven into the story of her affection for a young man, provide a description of her typical day, what foods she forages or harvests from the gardens adjoining her home or down in the valley, what meals she prepares, the gossip currently circulating, and the noticeable changes in the weather. Describe the water harvesting features that the Hohokam have built, how they have been tested by alternating drought years and extreme rain events, and the stresses this brings to the village. Describe a visit to the ceremonial center to place flowers by a central altar and to pray to the gods for gentle rain and good harvests, as well as a personal prayer.
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#RestorationGeneration.
當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。
When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
I think of you and Bernie Sanders together: defying the probable, presenting the possible,
spending your life energy for all.
Blessings, and long and satisfying lives to you both.