page_title: Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest
section_title: Floodplain cultivation
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest / Water management / Floodplain cultivation
caption_attribution_description: English: Hohokam Pima National Monument — a Hohokam cultural site, in Pinal County, Arizona. Currently closed to the public.
context_page_description: Agriculture in the prehistoric Southwest describes the agricultural practices of the Native Americans inhabiting the American Southwest, which includes the states of Arizona and New Mexico plus portions of surrounding states and neighboring Mexico. Maize was the dominant crop. Introduced from Mesoamerica, it was first cultivated in the Southwest about 2100 BCE. Sedentary cultures based on farming developed afterwards including the Hohokam, Mogollon, Ancestral Puebloans, and Patayan. Due to a deficiency in precipitation throughout the region, irrigation and several techniques of water harvesting and conservation were essential for successful agriculture.
context_section_description: In their effort to attain food security, Southwestern Indians cultivated the floodplains of rivers and ephemeral streams. Crops were planted on floodplains and islands to take advantage of high water when the river or stream overflowed, saturated the land with water and enriched the soil with silt. This method was most effective when floods came at predictable times. Floodplain cultivation was used instead of canal irrigation by the La Junta Indians (often called Jumano) along the Rio Grande in western Texas and was also employed by other peoples.
  The semi-nomadic Tohono O'odham and other Indians of the Sonora Desert practiced ak-chin cultivation of the indigenous tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius). In this austere desert environment, after a summer monsoon rains, the Papago would rush to plant tepary beans in small areas where a stream or arroyo had overflowed and the soil was soaked. The tepary bean quickly germinated and matured before the soil dried out. The Indians often managed the flow of floodwater to facilitate the growth of the beans.
  Floodplain cultivation was possible under the most extreme conditions.  The Sand Papago (Hia C-eḍ O'odham) were mainly hunter-gatherers but practiced floodplain cultivation when it was possible for them to do so.  In 1912, ethnographer Carl Lumholtz found small cultivated fields primarily of Tepary beans in the Pinacate Peaks area of Sonora.  In the Pinacate, with an average annual precipitation of three inches (75mm) and temperatures up to 118F (48C), Papago and Mexican farmers utilized runoff from sparse rains to grow crops.  In the 1980s author Gary Paul Nabhan visited this area, and found one farm family taking advantage of the first large rain in six years, planting seeds in the wet ground and harvesting a crop two months later.  The most successful crops were Tepary beans and a drought-adapted squash. Nabhan calculated that the Pinacate is the most arid area in the world where rain-fed agriculture is practiced.
caption: Snaketown: in 1000 CE, this was a flourishing Hohokam settlement of more than 1,000 people with canals bringing water from the nearby Gila River.
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