, The Park of the Canals preserves about 4,500 feet of ancient canals. A third ancient canal is located just North of the playground. The bridge to the playground spans another prehistoric canal. This canal is located West of the cactus garden. , In 1878, Mormon Pioneers constructed their first major canal by cleaning out an ancient Hohokam canal.
For reasons still unknown, the Hohokam abandoned their canal system and left the valley by 1450 A.D. Some of the canals extended over 12 miles in length. Estimates suggest that the canals may have supported between 30,000 and 60,000 people with up to 100,000 acres under cultivation. , Over 500 miles of Hohokam canal have been recorded in the Salt River Valley. They developed an extensive canal system and raised corn, beans, squash, agave and cotton. Prehistoric Indians entered the Salt River Valley. There is also the Park of the Four Waters in Phoenix, which can be seen during tours of Pueblo Grande.Prehistoric Irrigation in the Salt River Valley. Those wanting to see the canals can go to Mesa's Park of the Canals, a public park open for visitors. In this case, they were able to dig out the old canal and have it up and running in a matter of months." "If you have to dig a canal system like that from scratch and you plunk a bunch of people down, you have to support them for a couple years while they dig it out. "It had a big impact on the historic development here," said Howard.
However, their legacy remained: in the late 1800s, pioneers were able to excavate and use one of the old canals. The Hohokam disappeared from the archeological recording by 1500 AD under circumstances that are not entirely understood. Each canal had a life of between 50 and 100 years before it became silted in, after which it would be dug out or, in some cases, it appears that an entirely new canal would be constructed. Digging the canals was a matter of sheer labour, with people moving dirt with baskets and digging by hand or stick. Maintaining the system would have been an elaborate affair-Howard said the levels of organization needed indicate that the Hohokam would have had near-statelike levels of society. They are also sophisticated-for example, the sizes of the canals decrease as they move away from the headways, which would have allowed for a more consistent flow rate. The canal systems are surprisingly large, with some channels spanning more than 32 kilometres in length, with depths of 4.5 metres and widths of 14 metres.
"The Hohokam were able to come here to an arid environment where you couldn’t live any other way than by building canals," said Howard, "and then put together this phenomenally engineered system and survive." He said these canals provide significant insight into Hohokam culture. Jerry Howard, the curator of anthropology at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa, has been studying the canals for nearly 30 years. The creation of these canals would change the land permanently, enriching it and benefiting pioneers centuries later. How? The Hohokam dug a sophisticated network of canal systems, capable of irrigating tens of thousands of acres. But the Hohokam, a people who arrived in southwestern Arizona approximately 2,000 years ago and stayed until 1450 AD, were able to thrive. Thousands of years ago, the land in the Mesa area was what one would expect of desert dirt: dry, devoid of nutrients, sandy.
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