The Desert Archaic Culture

Human History One of the first humans to live in the Colorado River watershed were believed to be the Paleo indians of Clovis and Fulsom cultures. This civilization came to the river about 1200 years ago and first settle on the Colorado Plateau. Another group that settled in this area was the Desert Archaic culture. These people were typically known as nomads, and they gathered plants and animals to survive. Long after these cultures came the Fremont culture that also settled on the Colorado Plateau around 900 years ago. This culture was the first in this watershed to cultivate crops and build “masonry dwellings”. They also created rock art and petroglyphs that can be still seen today. Furthermore, descendents of the Desert Archaic culture, the Ancient Puebloans, occupied the corner areas of the

The Hohokam culture constructed and used more irrigation systems than any other previous culture in the Colorado river watershed. Their system of irrigation canals were built in and along the Gila river at which they were settle in and the canals ranged from 180 to 300 miles long. These canals had the ability to irrigate 25,000 to 250,000 acres of land. Although these canals provided water to many different regions of the watershed and allowed different civilizations to maintain their crops and water supply, the canals were also destructive to the natural topography of the land. It morphed the land significantly and altered quite a few waterways in the Colorado river basin. All of these early human groups also logged and harvested throughout many years of living in the watershed, but their actions also abused the land around them. Alterations in the land caused flash floods which in turn made agriculture difficult, which was a problem that was attempted at being fixed, but the megadrought stopped everything within the civilization and actually resulted in the collapse of the ancient civilizations. Most of the natives migrated to different lands or