ABSTRACT
For generations, the Hohokam people inhabited the land that we recognize today as Phoenix. Their prehistoric society constructed over 1,000 miles of irrigation canals and then, quite inexplicably disappeared around 1450 (Gober and Trapido-Lurie 2006). When Europeans began to explore the region 300 years later, an entrepreneur by the name of Jack Swilling rediscovered the canal network and proclaimed that this settlement would rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the Hohokam city (Gober and Trapido-Lurie 2006, p. 17).1
