ABSTRACT
Indians have lived in the area that is Arizona for a very long time, at least 15,000 years, whereas whites have been there only a very short time. Upper Paleolithic peoples were the first to live in the Arizona area, and they lived there for a very long time, though they made no lasting impact upon the environment. The civilizations in Arizona seem to have developed very slowly as the local Indians living in the Desert culture began to learn about agriculture. The Mogollon lived in the mountains along what is the New Mexico-Arizona border. Spanish settlement moved rapidly northward from Mexico City along the Central Plateau of Mexico, and the Conchos Valley in northern Mexico was settled as early as 1570 by miners and missionaries. The Spanish attempted, and largely succeeded, in establishing the same social system in the New World, with the Spanish and mestizo as the land-rich aristocracy and the Indians as the peasants.
