The stories of trading posts in the Southwest are a unique snapshot of life almost one hundred years ago. In the early 1900’s, trading posts in the Four corners flourished. There were over one hundred trading posts on the plateau, but today only five remain. Why did they vanish? The challenges and unexpected gifts of […]
The Colorado, the Gila, the Salt, the Verde, the Hassayampa, the Santa Cruz: Arizona’s rivers were lush green ribbons of life flowing through a desert landscape. They became sustaining paths for indigenous traders and immigrants leaving wagon tracks and settlements. The Hohokam built vast canals from the Salt to direct irrigation water for crops. European […]
Drawing from multi-cultural influences of the variety of people who helped build Arizona, discover how creative adaptations in lifestyle, architecture, building materials, town planning and even humor all contributed to surviving intense desert temperatures. What have we forgotten and what can we learn from the wisdom of those who came before as climate becomes a […]
Numerous fires, landslides, floods, labor strikes, polluted air, epidemics, Depression, recessions, financial collapse, one adversity after another. Any one of these might spell the end of a lesser community. But, in Arizona, one town survived these “near-death” experiences, and more; yet managed to survive. Some might even say, “thrive.” This presentation looks at the numerous […]
Turquoise has a long standing tradition amongst Native cultures of the Southwest, holding special significance and profound meanings to specific individual tribes. Even before the more contemporary tradition of combining silver with turquoise, cultures throughout the southwest used turquoise in necklaces, earrings, mosaics, fetishes, medicine pouches, and made bracelets of basketry stems lacquered with piñon […]
Native Americans in the U.S. Southwest developed sophisticated skills in astronomy and predicting the seasons, centuries before non-Indian peoples entered the region. In this presentation archaeologist Allen Dart discusses the petroglyphs at Picture Rocks, the architecture of the “Great House” at Arizona’s Casa Grande Ruins, and other archaeological evidence of ancient southwestern astronomy and calendrical […]
From the time humans began to live in communities myths and legends have sought to explain the universe and teach social values. “Arizona Legends, Myths, and Folklore” presents stories from Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and Tohono O’odham cultures as well as Hispanic, Euro-American and others. You will learn about Navajo constellations, Spider Woman, Hopi katsinas, the […]
For a state that has been home to Geronimo, Wyatt Earp, César Chavez and Wonder Women, you would think Arizona earned some respect. Yet achieving statehood was a 50-year struggle, which finally ended on February 14, 1912. Jana borrows from both her work for True West Magazine and her work for Phoenix Magazine to put […]
Place names are like fossil poetry. They afford a kind of folk history, a snapshot in time that enables us to read in them a record of important events, and reconstruct something of the members of a culture at the time they assigned names to the places they saw. The United States has over 3.5 […]
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