Early Human History for the Sonoran Desert

McDowell Sonoran Conservancy

The presentation will cover humans living in the Sonoran Desert for the last ice age up until around 1900 AD with the advent of European colonists, settlers, and miners. Cultures and peoples that will be presented cover roughly 10,000 years of human occupants including the first Americans, Archaic hunter gatherers, the Hohokam, Yavapai and Apache peoples, and early Europeans.

You will learn why the Hohokam were considered the “Masters of the Desert” and about Generals McDowell and Stoneman. Cultural evidence of these earlier peoples in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve include rock shelters, petroglyphs, broken pottery, dwellings, stone tools, irrigation canals, and mining shafts. The objective is to gain a greater appreciation of those who came before and what they left behind.

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