HOHOKAM The Three Sisters
According to Navajo legend, “The Three Sisters” is the combination of planted maize, squash and beans. The Three Sisters get along so well when they are planted together. The bean vines climb up the corn stalks for support, while the squash plants cover the ground below the beans. The large leaves of the squash plants keep out the weeds and shade the soil to keep it from drying out. Although corn plants have high nitrogen demand, bean plants are legumes and “fix” or remove nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil, which helps to meet corn’s nitrogen demand.
80,000 Hohokam people (10,000 to 16,000 families) to use for drinking, washing, bathing, and crop irrigation, assuming that per person consumptive water use was a few gallons a day and crop-irrigation water consumptive use for corn (maize), cotton, tobacco and deep-rooted, beans, squash and peppers was a few feet per season. Crop acreages are estimated at over 100,000 acres.
Figure 4. Archaeologist Emil “Doc” Haury in an Excavated Canal at Snaketown (S. of Phoenix) in 1964 (Rose 2014). The reddish color and its increase in intensity upwards suggest that this canal cuts an older alluvial fan with a well-developed soil profile Image source:
http://waterhistory.org/histories/hohokam2).
Before every monsoon season the canals had to be ardu- ously maintained and repaired. This included the re-digging of silted-in canals and the replacement of worn out or damaged portable sluices, which were made of cloth or interwoven plant stalks, or simply piled rock. The perennial big question was ”should the villagers try to bring more land under cultivation, or cut back to less?”
In the Phoenix area the base flow and the recurring winter and summer floods provided sufficient water for 50,000 to
From the Arizona State Museum, Paths of Life – American Indians of the Southwest and Mexico:
“The world would burn without rain.” Tohono O’odham wisdom
The arrival of summer rains is a critical event that marks the beginning of the O’odham year. A Tohono O’odham legend relates the harvest of the saguaro fruit to the arrival of the rains.
Long ago, a dust devil attacked the daughter of a powerful man. Enraged, her father convinced his neighbors to drive the Wind away. But when the Wind departed, he took along his blind friend Rain. For four years, everything withered.
When they could stand the heat and thirst no more, the O’odham asked the Hummingbird to find Wind and Rain, and beg them to return. Tying some of his down on a stick, Hummingbird flew across the earth until he saw the down stir.
He found Wind and Rain in a cave. Wind said, “Tell our relatives that if they want us, they must sing for us for four nights. We’ll return when they finish the ceremony.”
Hummingbird returned to the O’odham with the Wind’s demand. The people decided that they needed to make the Wind forget their harsh words.
And so, they made nawait – saguaro wine. 6 TPG •
Jan.Feb.Mar 2021
Figure 5. Mural in the Arizona Museum of Natural History of the Rowley Site, near Park of the Canals in Mesa, c. 1200-1450, by Ann and Jerry Schutte, showing typical Hohokam agricultural layouts (With permission of Arizona Museum Of Natural History).
Most of the farmed land was flood irrigated along short rows, small squares or rectangular flat plots by canals (Figure 5). Some was drip irrigated using large hollowed water-filled gourds. Crops were typically corn, beans, squash, melons, pep- pers, cotton and tobacco. Agave plants were also stand-alone common crops.
www.aipg.org
But estimates made from captured base (groundwater- inflow) canal flows, and from consumptive domestic and irrigation water use, confirm that base-flow alone was insuf- ficient to support the large population as well as the irrigated acreages indicated by the archaeological evidence. Therefore, by ancient tradition, the Hohokam prepared three times the amount of land that they expected that the farmers could nor- mally irrigate and cultivate, so as to provide an opportunity to plant, produce, harvest and store more if the gods permitted.
Just about everyone in the villages was directly tied to com- munity agriculture. Some families were more often successful than others because of their land’s fertility, their family’s size and ability, or their inherited secrets of crop pest and disease control, soil amendments and fertilization.
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