History of Arizona: Encyclopedia II - History of Arizona - Prehistory

History of Arizona - Prehistory

History of Arizona - The Paleo-Indians and Archaic peoples

According to the best archaeological and geological evidence available, Paleolithic, mammoth-hunting families moved into northwestern North America sometime between 16,000 BC and 10,000 BC. In central Alaska, they found their passage blocked by a huge sheet of ice until a temporary recession in the last ice age that opened up an ice-free corridor through northwestern Canada, allowing bands to fan out throughout the rest of the continent. The earliest undisputed evidence of humans in the southwestern United States is a set of fluted spear points from the Paleolithic ^[1]. Some scientists have proposed that small bands of women, men and children wandered across the deserts of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico 10,000 to 20,000 years earlier than the mammoth hunters.

In the opinion of geoscientist Paul Martin, these bands^[2], armed with Clovis points (named for the site near Clovis, New Mexico where the first point was found), encountered mammoths, camels, ground sloths, and horses. As these species had never faced sophisticated big-game hunters before, the result was the "Pleistocene overkill", the rapid and systematic slaughter of nearly all the species of large ice-age mammals in North America by 8000 BC. In a sense, the hunters who pursued the Nero mammoths may have represented the first of Arizona's many cycles of boom and bust, in which a single resource is relentlessly exploited until that resource has been depleted or destroyed.

Archaeologists call the 7,000 years between the disappearance of big-game hunters and the emergence of pottery-making societies in the 2nd century the Archaic period. Most Archaic groups survived by becoming generalists rather than specialists, foraging in seasonal movements across the mountains, deserts and plateaus. They did not abandon hunting, but they depended to a much greater degree upon wild plant foods and small game. Their tools became more varied, with grinding and chopping implements becoming more common, a sign that seeds, fruits and greens constituted a greater proportion of their diet.

Climate changes drove the transition from big-game hunting. When the first big-game hunters entered Arizona, the forests were as much as 3,000 feet lower than they are today. In the Sonoran Desert, piñon, juniper and oak woodlands extended as far as 1,800 feet down slopes, the elevation of lower slopes of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. Desert grasslands studded with Joshua trees, beargrass and yucca carpeted valleys below. The great ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Plateau did not exist. Instead, the Mogollon Rim supported vast stands of mixed conifers such as Douglas fir, blue spruce and Rocky Mountain juniper—the trees characteristic of higher altitudes today. The giant saguaro, the plant that symbolizes Arizona in many people's minds, had largely taken refuge in present-day Mexico.

Temperatures rose, and the seasonal distribution of precipitation began to change, causing major changes in the vegetation as well. The Clovis people were stalking mammoths and other ice-age species in southeastern Arizona at a time when many streams were drying up, forcing animals to concentrate around streams and seeps. The growing aridity of the region therefore coincided with the arrival of hunters who specialized in the pursuit of large mammals. It is possible that climate and humans acted together to bring an end to these species.

Arizona grew even more arid after the last ice age came to an end. Summers grew wetter, but warmer, so rainfall evaporated quicker. Winters became considerably drier, making less moisture available to plants. In southern Arizona, woodlands gave way to desert grasslands, and desert grasslands gave way to desert scrub. Important Sonoran Desert species like saguaro and brittlebush began to recolonize the region from the south, while ponderosa forests and piñon-juniper-oak woodlands climbed back onto the Colorado Plateau. By 2000 BC the modern plant communities of Arizona had been established and a modern climate prevailed.

The early Archaic peoples of Arizona survived these changes by adapting to the cycles of plants rather than trying to change them. In the woodlands, they gathered acorns in July and August, and piñon nuts and juniper berries in November. In the desert, they picked the leaves of annual plants like chenopodium (goosefoot) and amaranth (pigweed). They also roasted agave in rock-lined pits each spring, and collected cactus fruit and harvested mesquite pods in the summer. Because of their dependence on scattered and seasonal resources, Archaic groups did not occupy permanent settlements. Instead, they wandered from camp to camp in search of water and wild foods.

Their tools reflected their economy: ground stones (manos and metates) were used for grinding seeds into flour, scrapers for working hide and wood, and projectile points, smaller and cruder than the earlier Clovis and Folsom points, for hunting large and small game. The varying proportions of such tools at different sites suggest that people moved back and forth between different environmental zones to exploit their particular resources. Archaic peoples fashioned artifacts that demonstrated their capacity for wonder and their quest for supernatural power. Intaglios 10 to 100 feet in length appeared on both sides of the Colorado River in southeastern California and southwestern Arizona. Many of them were of stylized rattlesnakes, thunderbirds, phalli, and human forms.

History of Arizona - The introduction of agriculture

For most of the Archaic period, people were not able to transform their natural environment in any fundamental way. Many archaeologists assumed that the Archaic cultures of Arizona were dead ends. They believed groups outside the region, particularly Mesoamerica, introduced major innovations like agriculture into the Southwest. According to this model, maize first put down Southwestern roots in the highlands of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, the pre-Hispanic cultural area known as the Mogollon. Archaic populations there began growing a small and primitive variety of maize at places like Bat Cave as early as 3500 BC. From there, maize spread slowly to more arid and lowland areas, such as the Sonoran Desert.

During the 1980s these early maize dates were challenged by a refinement in radiocarbon dating using the accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) technique. Accelerator dates reveal that the first corn from Bat Cave and other highland sites appeared around 1000 BC, 2,500 years later than previously thought. A number of sites excavated in southern Arizona demonstrate that Archaic farmers were cultivating maize in the Tucson Basin at around the same time as well. At the Milagro site along Tanque Verde Creek, for example, a Late Archaic population built pit houses, dug bell-shaped storage pits, and planted maize around 850 BC. Archaic groups, then, were already beginning to make the transition from food gatherers to food producers around 3,000 years ago. They also possessed many of the cultural features that accompany semisedentary agricultural life: storage facilities, more permanent dwellings, larger settlements, and even cemeteries.

Despite the early advent of farming, late Archaic groups still exercised little control over their natural environment. Furthermore, wild food resources remained important components of their diet even after the invention of pottery and the development of irrigation. The introduction of agriculture never resulted in the complete abandonment of hunting and foraging, even in the largest of Archaic societies. During the 1st millennium AD, at least three major cultures flourished in the Southwest: the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. These three cultures are well known for their architecture and pottery.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Prehistory", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki