The First to Fall?

There’s a fascinating read today in the Arizona Republic about the Hohokam civilization that goes back some 3,000 years and created a huge culture that spanned the area currently occupied by Phoenix, Arizona. Unfortunately, the Hohokam overreached what the area could support and collapsed, leaving only a few standing walls and the bare remnants of a great civilization by the time Europeans made it to the Salt River Valley after the Civil War.

Look across Phoenix at night and it seems resplendent, unassailable, along seamless corridors of light where the once lonely towns of Mesa, Tempe, Chandler and Goodyear converge, absorbed into a greater municipality. Curiously, these lights define the same settlement patterns archaeologists have found among Hohokam communities. The two cities overlap as if made for each other.

My take from the story is that as smart as we 21st century humans think we are, there are few problems we have that haven’t been dealt with by those who went before, and who as much as we’d like to believe were savages not intelligent enough to survive, may have easily been our match in most ways that make up the difference between life and death. Who can doubt that humans repeat historical failure constantly and that we never seem to learn enough from our travails? Who is to say those who live in the space formerly occupied by the Hohokam are any more suited to succeed when that vanished people failed?

Modern, historic canals follow those of a vanished people (Part 1) – azcentral.com.

Demise of Ancient People a Harbinger for Valley (Part 2)

For Phoenix, as for Hohokams, the rise is just like the fall (Part 3)

Posted in Society