ABSTRACT
The first Europeans who entered the upper Rio Grande of northern New Spain in the sixteenth century encountered Pueblo Indians whose Anasazi ancestors were the first horticulturalists of the region to develop stable food production by the use of rain harvesting and intricate systems of water control. Due to Spanish colonization goals, new and more expansive settlements were to be located throughout the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro following the Rio Grande and its tributaries into the high sierras of northern New Mexico. Water from snowmelt was essential to the establishment of agricultural communities in valley floors where isolated pockets of arable land were located in proximity to streams, creeks, and arroyos. The Hispanic settlers from central Mexico and their Indian allies who crossed through the deserts of Nueva Vizcaya, now Durango and Chihuahua, into the Jornada del Muerto eventually reached the alpine watersheds to the north. Here, they constructed gravity flow irrigation ditches transforming the semi-arid landscape into agrosystems that have survived into modern times as examples of the millennial culture of water of Arab, Iranian and Saharan origin that reached the New World.
