The Canal Routes Phoenix Still Uses Are About 1,000 Years Old

The Hohokam who built the platform mound at S'edav Va'aki dug hundreds of miles of irrigation canals across the Salt River Valley by hand, using no metal tools, and engineered them precisely enough to move water across a floodplain with virtually no modern surveying equipment. When the village was officially renamed — replacing the Spanish word "pueblo" with the O'odham S'edav Va'aki, meaning roughly "central ceremonial house," a nod to the site's position within that same canal network — it wasn't just a linguistic correction. Central Arizona's modern water utility still routes a significant share of its canals along those exact original alignments; the ditches that turned this stretch of Sonoran Desert into farmland a millennium ago are, in large part, the same ones still doing the job today.

The 437 kachina dolls in the Heard Museum's collection arrived with an unlikely donor. Barry Goldwater — Arizona's senator and, that same year, the Republican Party's nominee for president — gave his Hopi katsina collection to the museum in 1964, the same election cycle that made him a national conservative icon. Decades before the campaign, Goldwater had spent years photographing and studying Hopi ceremonial life across the reservation, and the dolls he handed over remain one of the most complete documentary collections of Hopi religious carving anywhere, donated by a man better remembered for a landslide presidential defeat than for his ethnographic fieldwork.