Earth’s Natural Nature
Thursday, January 26th, 2012Thousands of years ago, the first human came to the Southwest, probably crossing the land bridge of the Bering Sea from Asia. Subsisting by hunting animals and gathering plants from the wild, those who settled here found ample food to sustain themselves in the varied geography of desert and mountains, basin and range. Deer and elk wandered the highlands. Trout glided silently through mountain streams. Across the plains roamed herds of American bison, more familiarly known as buffalo. Everywhere, jackrabbits and cottontails, wild turkeys and pig like peccaries provided other steady sources of protein. The earth, too, provided abundant blessings. Southwestern tribes learned to extract nourishment from the pulp and fruit, beans, seeds and nuts of such wild plants as agave and prickly pear cactus, saguaro and yucca, mesquite and piñon, acorn and sunflower.
They also soon learned to gain more reliable, consistent sustenance from plants they could grow, irrigate and harvest themselves: the culinary holy trinity of corn, squashes and beans. With the more settled life that such early agricultural efforts engendered, three great, sometimes interlinked cultures developed in the Southwest. In the Sonoran Desert and near the Mogollon Rim of southern and central Arizona, the Hohokam built villages that featured intricate networks of irrigation canals. Covering the southwestern third of Nw Mexico and reaching well into central Arizona and northern Mexico, the Mogollon people developed multiroomed villages and dug ditches to water their crops.
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